Affinity Designer and Photo won't open

[Kar123]

Hello,

I can't get Affinity Designer and Photo to open on my Dell XPS 15 9550. I reinstalled Windows 10 on my laptop and after that I reinstalled affinity as well on my laptop but now it doesnt open anymore.

When I try to open it, the main panel with the illustrations opens but after that it quickly closes again. There are no errors popping up. The app itself doesn't open.

I tried to uninstall and remove every file of Affinity on my laptop and the reinstall it again from the Serif site (that's where I bought the apps), but it still doesn't work. I tried to open the app as administrator but it stil doesn't open.

I really need the app, pleasr help. What should I do?

Regards

[v_kyr]

Could have several different reasons, thus you may want to look if you can find some actual dated Affinity crash report file which might tell the cause, see ...

• [FAQ] Where to find Crash Reports

It could also be related to as default enabled Affinity OpenCL performance hardware acceleration and your GPU drivers, in such cases you can try this tool here on Win, or instead perform the steps manually to disable OpenCL hardware acceleration (see this FAQ for manually disabling OpenCL).

Other than the above (in case nothing applies) the Windows system logs might too can give the one or other hint for possible crashes and their cause ...

• How to View Windows 10 Crash Logs and Error Logs

• How to view crash logs in Windows 10

[Kar123]

994c717a-754a-4402-a725-446ffcd091c1.dmp

Here is a crashreport in case it can help.

I will try the things you have listed and see if it works

Thank you

[Kar123]

When reading this link you posted I navigated to %AppData%\Affinity\Designer\1.0\Settings\ as described and found out that that folder is empty. So maybe something went wrong when installing the software?

I can't find the PerformancePreferences.xml in there.

Edited March 11, 2021 by Kar123

[v_kyr]

That attached crash report tells, that a read access violation in OpenCL.dll is the cause for the crash. So it has somehow to do with GPU drivers and Affinity performance OpenCL hardware acceleration settings.

Quote

Operating system: Windows NT
                  6.2.19041 804
CPU: amd64
     family 6 model 94 stepping 3
     8 CPUs

GPU: UNKNOWN

Crash reason:  EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION_READ
Crash address: 0x7ffd44907348
Process uptime: 4 seconds

Thread 0 (crashed)
 0  OpenCL.dll + 0x171b
    rax = 0x00000061517fd9e0   rdx = 0x0000000000000902
    rcx = 0x0000022ee16f4560   rbx = 0x0000022ee16f4560
    rsi = 0x0000000000000000   rdi = 0x0000000000000000
    rbp = 0x0000000000000902   rsp = 0x00000061517fd970
     r8 = 0x0000000000000000    r9 = 0x0000000000000000
    r10 = 0x00007ffd44907340   r11 = 0x00000061517fd910
    r12 = 0x0000022ee17e37e0   r13 = 0x0000022ee17e37f0
    r14 = 0x0000000000000000   r15 = 0x0000022ee16f4560
    rip = 0x00007ffd71cf171b
    Found by: given as instruction pointer in context
 1  libraster.dll + 0x9a650
    rsp = 0x00000061517fd9b0   rip = 0x00007ffd4003a650
    Found by: stack scanning
 2  libraster.dll + 0x99f67
    rsp = 0x00000061517fda00   rip = 0x00007ffd40039f67
    Found by: stack scanning
 3  libkernel.dll + 0x4c7470
    rsp = 0x00000061517fda08   rip = 0x00007ffd557f7470
    Found by: stack scanning
 4  libraster.dll + 0x2b7c000
    rsp = 0x00000061517fda18   rip = 0x00007ffd42b1c000
    Found by: stack scanning
 5  libraster.dll + 0x5ce0a
    rsp = 0x00000061517fda20   rip = 0x00007ffd3fffce0a
    Found by: stack scanning
...
...

 

[Kar123]

All of my GPU drivers are up to date. I tried to uninstall affinity designer again and downloaded the Affinity Designer 1.8.5 version. And this one worked perfectly fine. After that I tried to update the software to the latest 1.9.1 version and the same problem happened again. The app didn't open at all. I will have to use the 1.8.5 version for the time being I think. I don't really understand how to fix the problem regarding OpenCL.dll .  Maybe there is a bug in the 1.9.1 version of Affinity Designer.

Edited March 11, 2021 by Kar123

[v_kyr]

Well I already told you what to do and try out with v1.9.1, namely here ...

Quote

It could also be related to as default enabled Affinity OpenCL performance hardware acceleration and your GPU drivers, in such cases you can try this tool here on Win, or instead perform the steps manually to disable OpenCL hardware acceleration (see this FAQ for manually disabling OpenCL).

... you have to disable the hardware acceleration in the Affinity Photo and Designer PerformancePreferences.xml settings file, which you can find under ...

%AppData%\<APPNAME>\1.0\Settings\

... thus the paths to look after for the PerformancePreferences.xml files and their contents in your case are ...

     C:\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Photo\1.0\Settings\PerformancePreferences.xml
     C:\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\Settings\PerformancePreferences.xml

... in those files there must be an entry edited to ...

     <UseHardwareAcceleration>False</UseHardwareAcceleration>

See also the related FAQ entry:

• see this FAQ for manually disabling OpenCL

... or use this tool, it does the same automatically for all Affinity apps if pressing one of the top buttons ...

• Affinity OpenCL Disabler

Further it doesn't matter if your GPU drivers are up-to-date, as far as they are buggy behaving related to OpenCL usage.

[v_kyr]

You can also try the latest Beta version: Affinity Photo Windows Customer Beta - 1.9.2.997  and see if that fixes your problems!

And: Affinity Designer Windows Customer Beta - 1.9.2.997

[Kar123]

So I did as you told me and disabled the hardware acceleration manually on v1.9.1 but the app still acted the same way and didn't open.

However, the BETA 1.9.2 version seems to work perfectly fine for me, both for Designer and for Photo.

Thank you for your time sir!