hardware gurus: specs for a new Mac, specifically for Affinity tools?

[spinhead]

I'm running into what I believe is a file size/complexity issue with Designer and Photo on my Mac Mini. (I've been away from computer hardware details for 20 years, so I plan to sound ignurrint here.) The Mini has no GPU (I think) so while everything else is snappity-doo-dah screen repaints a r e . s o o o o o o o . s l o w.

If I can sneak muscle get my request past the Secretary of the Exchequer (the one I'm married to) can anyone advise on specs for the perfect Mac for Designer and Photo? Assuming a powerful GPU matters, and I always get at least 16GB RAM, but what else matters?

[v_kyr]

What specs does your actual Mini have (Apple > About should tell you)?

[spinhead]

I misinterpreted what I read about the GPU; my current specs attached.

[firstdefence]

If anything it will be the Processor that is giving you a lack lustre performance, the fact you have big sur and probably the hard-drive assuming it's a SATA mechanical drive.

So you want the fastest CPU you can afford with an SSD hard drive, and it all comes down to how much you can squeeze out of the bank.

[Fixx]

True, that processor is no speed demon, but maybe some owner of similar late 2014 mac mini can tell how it performs? My MBP is older and works just fine with AP and AD.

Any new mac works fine with Affinity as long as it has M1 processor. 16GB is of course future proof.

[v_kyr]

Yes the CPU is a little bit clocked low but should still work Ok, 16 GB of RAM are fine and the HDD (harddisk) might be not the fastest in contrast to SSDs. Here replacing the HDD with a SSD would speed up data read/write access at least.

• Mac mini Late 2014 Hard Drive Replacement

Other than that your system should perform usually Ok and I would blame possible slowness etc. more to Big Sur and the Affinity apps, which both are still in transition and thus far away from being bug free and overall well behaving. - Thus I actually probably would still wait a little bit, until more major Apple M2 hardware materializes on the scene.

[spinhead]

@v_kyr Would drive speed affect screen repaints when I zoom, move, or recolor something? I had, though, stepped outside reality for a moment and forgot that Big Sur is new, AP 1.9 is new, and the M1 Macs are way too new.

Maybe I'll try that patience stuff I've heard so much about.

[v_kyr]

40 minutes ago, spinhead said:

Would drive speed affect screen repaints when I zoom, move, or recolor something?

No not really! - You also have to check out how other graphics related software behave here in contrast then with your actual hardware. If other software is snappy performing, you know it's more an Affinity related issue and nothing else then.

[spinhead]

8 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

other graphics related software

does not compute ;) I used to have a Photoshop subscription but never worked on anything large; all web assets. all I have now are AD and AP.

[v_kyr]

As said download and test some other apps (tryout versions etc.) first in order to see how these behave then. Do a Google search there are hundreds of graphics apps for MacOS!

[firstdefence]

As a standard and to use as a test it might be an idea to give a workflow (what steps you are taking) and a file you edited so we can try it ourselves and see if we and maybe someone with a similar spec to yours gets a similar result to you.

Upload a file you would like us to work on and the steps you took to get it to behave sloooooooooooowly lol!

ps Actually you could save an Affinity file with History and upload it and we could move through the steps.

[spinhead]

Making any change to color or layout resulted in a painfully slow screen repaint. This should be interesting.

20210309.afphoto

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, spinhead said:

Making any change to color or layout resulted in a painfully slow screen repaint. This should be interesting.

20210309.afphoto 52.94 MB · 2 downloads

For what very little it is worth, I turned on (made visible) every layer in your document & then did various things like toggling on & off visibility of the Invert Adjustment & changing the blend mode of the topmost pixel layer. On my Intel powered iMac (specs below in my sig) the longest delay I saw in redrawing was about 2-3 seconds.

I think most of the delay is due to the extreme number of objects that have fx applied to them. With just the 2 top layers visible, panning, zooming, or translating (moving, rotating), erasing, etc. anything was super-fast, essentially in real time.

[spinhead]

Toggling Invert is instant for me as well. Toggling all layers to visible took 15 seconds. Zooming to 100% took about 4. As of today, there's essentially no delay in anything else, so perhaps the wombat that lives in my computer was gnawing on things yesterday. No reboot, running pretty much the same apps as I was yesterday, and it's all different.

[firstdefence]

I'm getting block refreshing on my ye olde 2011 iMac, but like RCr said probably due to all the fx etc

I think you need to make a styles category of all the fx you have and think about applying styles to groups instead of individual layers. Where repeated shapes have the same fx you can have a group with a single fx/style applied and you can have groups within groups to apply another fx/style to the child group.

I think that may improve the documents performance, it might be worth making a copy and trying to minimise the layers that have fx/styles, just needs a bit of organising and good names for the styles.

[spinhead]

9 hours ago, firstdefence said:

. . . make a styles category . . . applying styles to groups . . .

So you're suggesting efficiency and organization. Interesting approach.

I have been lazy about using the Affinity tools tidily. Good reminder to step back and review and revise my workflow. Thanks @firstdefence. I'll let you know how an efficientized version of the file behaves.