UI is laggy and sticky

[Olyandros]

Hi there,

I have experienced some sever lagging and sticking with the UI in the current version. It is really frustrating to finetune something (e.g. curves) with such a behaviour. I don't mind that the refresh of the image takes a moment but the UI should not be affected by the number crunching. Attached is a video demonstrating what I mean.

Thist runs on a Threadripper 2950x, 64GB Ram and two GTX 1070s.

Turning on OpenCL doesn't help much I usually have it turned off for stability reasons.

2021-04-08 11-04-57.mkv

[Chris B]

Hey Olyandros,

That lag is quite considerable compared to the tests I've just done.

Does this happen on a new document with a single shape? I wonder if it's more of a combination of layers in your doc as opposed to any hardware issue as yours is very capable. 

Saying that, I haven't see many (if any) people with SLI GPU's using Affinity. I wonder if disabling one of them makes a difference?

[Olyandros]

Hi Chris,

perfomance is better with fewer layers . I often have the feeling that AP is highly performant with just a few layers but as soon as you throw a bit more complex comps in the mix it starts to crumble really fast. And as I said I don't mind that the curve correction doesn't update the document view in realtime but that the UI becomes so sluggish, those two processes shouldn't be connected in my opinion.  Don't want to be that guy who points towards Photoshop ... but I guess I am

The two GPUs are not connected via SLI as it is not needed for GPU Rendering so I don't think it has an impact. But I will try to turn one off and report if something changes.

[Chris B]

The difference between Photoshop and Affinity Photo - or at least one that can impact performance and lead people to compare, is that Photoshop doesn't use live filter layers which can cause Photo to slow down because you should either hide them or rasterise and bake them into the document once you're satisfied. With them active, the screen is contantly redrawing at different zoom levels at 60fps so it can use a lot of resources.

Saying that, your example barely had anything in it that I would consider troublesome. The document is quite big though and is there a reason you're in 32 bit?

[Olyandros]

It's a Multilayer EXR rendering in which the single elements (diffuse, reflection, etc ...) are combined by adding layers together, this has to be done in a linear color space so the math adds up, preferable in 32bit  (or 16 bit) float. Live filters are great but as you said they can slow things down. It would be nice to have some kind of live filter group that you could then be freezed in a certain state and reopened for editing later to safe some perfomance (ok, sounds like smart objects, I know).

I also attached the afphoto file, maybe you can have a look on your machine.

direct_output_test_AOV.zip

[Komatös]

I can't detect such a high lag either. 
What if you switch the renderer to WARP? The CPU is powerful enough for that.

Even if it seems unbelievable, it could even be due to the timings of the RAM.

[Olyandros]

Hi,

switching to WARP didn't help, I tried also turning off XMP and switched the RAM management from local to distributed and back, no change.