Performance Settings RAM

[Mike-71]

Hello,

 

after upgrading my RAM to 16 GB, the performance values in the settings are no longer correct. Does anyone have an idea to what extent I have to set or adjust the values.

I would also be interested in whether you should activate the OpenCL acceleration.

 

THX and Greetings Mike

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Mike-71 said:

I would also be interested in whether you should activate the OpenCL acceleration.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Given the number of reported problems, perhaps you shouldn't. But it may be worth experimenting with. It's up to you. The performance without it should be identical to what you had in 1.8.

However, it is activated by default in 1.9 when you have an appropriate Windows release and an appropriate GPU. So, if it's not enabled, and you did not specifically disable it, you probably cannot enable it.

[Dan C]

Hi @Mike-71,

Welcome to the Affinity forums

19 hours ago, Mike-71 said:

after upgrading my RAM to 16 GB, the performance values in the settings are no longer correct.

Firstly I'd recommend setting your RAM Limit (the first slider in the dialog) to 16384MB, so that the app can use all 16GB of your RAM when required.

19 hours ago, Mike-71 said:

I would also be interested in whether you should activate the OpenCL acceleration.

As Walt has mentioned above, this feature is still in an early phase of infancy and although it has the potential to speed up rendering drastically, it can also causes a few crashes currently.

If you are able to enable this and wish to try it, please make sure you're using the most up to date driver for your GPU from nVidia directly before enabling the option for the best results.

I also recommend checking out the following FAQ regarding the other options here and the best performance from the app -

I hope this helps

[Andy05]

17 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Firstly I'd recommend setting your RAM Limit (the first slider in the dialog) to 16384MB, so that the app can use all 16GB of your RAM when required.

Is this really the recommended way? As I experience a lot more crashes, when moving the slider to more than 70-75ish percent. And the more other apps I open, the worse. Whereas other design apps don't crash if set them to 100% RAM usage as they seem to set it free again when running in background or play nicely together with other apps in the background using my RAM.

I only have trouble with Affinity apps when they are allowed to claim up to 100% RAM.

[Dan C]

4 minutes ago, Andy05 said:

Is this really the recommended way?

My recommendation is for the default setting of Affinity, which sets this limit to 100% of your RAM allowance.

5 minutes ago, Andy05 said:

As I experience a lot more crashes, when moving the slider to more than 70-75ish percent. And the more other apps I open, the worse.
(...)
I only have trouble with Affinity apps when they are allowed to claim up to 100% RAM.

I certainly don't see the same behaviour and I have always used 100% for this slider - both using 16GB and 32GB of RAM in my PC. I'd recommend creating a bug report so our QA team can look into this further for you if the crashing becomes reproducibly more consistent with the sliders increased

[Andy05]

Just now, Dan C said:

My recommendation is for the default setting of Affinity, which sets this limit to 100% of your RAM allowance.

I certainly don't see the same behaviour and I have always used 100% for this slider - both using 16GB and 32GB of RAM in my PC. I'd recommend creating a bug report so our QA team can look into this further for you if the crashing becomes reproducibly more consistent with the sliders increased

Maybe it's a matter of how many different "RAM-high-impact" apps one runs next to Affinity's. Unfortunately, one has to run quite some of them in order to do those things which Affinity's apps can't do (yet). 

If I find some time for it, I'll try to reproduce it. Oh—and to be more specific—it's mainly Affinity Photo which crashes, followed by Publisher in quite some distance (which doesn't crash more often than with any other settings for usage of RAM) and only rarely Designer.

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, Andy05 said:

I only have trouble with Affinity apps when they are allowed to claim up to 100% RAM.

That may indicate that your Windows virtual storage configuration is not correct.

This post has a pointer to some instructions that will help verify that, and some follow-on discussion that may be relevant:

 

[Andy05]

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

That may indicate that your Windows virtual storage configuration is not correct.

No. It is set up correctly. Also, there's plenty of RAM available (64 GB) on top of the virtual RAM. Lastly, all other apps play nicely together. It's only Affinity (Photo), which causes trouble when setting to 100% usage of RAM.

 

[Mike-71]

I have the same problem as Andy05 with 8 GB of RAM. Often had crashes when the setting was 100%, i.e. 8 GB. Hence the upgrade to 16 GB. I will set the memory at AD to 75% and report.

[walt.farrell]

25 minutes ago, Mike-71 said:

I have the same problem as Andy05 with 8 GB of RAM. Often had crashes when the setting was 100%, i.e. 8 GB. Hence the upgrade to 16 GB. I will set the memory at AD to 75% and report.

You might want to check your virtual storage settings, though, and make sure they were updated to account for your newly added memory.

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Dan C said:

Firstly I'd recommend setting your RAM Limit (the first slider in the dialog) to 16384MB, so that the app can use all 16GB of your RAM when required.

I do not think any app actually can use all the installed RAM -- AFAIK, the OS always reserves some of it for its own use. If it did not, the OS could not function.

[v_kyr]

All that highly depends on how the related APh function internally deal with that RAM setting at all, so if they treat it like a VM with build-in GC (also freeing up occupied memory) mechanism or not. If the app only occupies/uses memory and does not release any memory during processing, then it would not be wise to make all available physical memory available to it.

[R C-R]

22 hours ago, v_kyr said:

All that highly depends on how the related APh function internally deal with that RAM setting at all ...

From what the staff have said in the past, it can be used to limit the maximum amount of RAM the Affinity app will use to allow other memory hungry apps running concurrently to use more of it, but I do not think they have ever explained how that is done. The help topic just says 

Quote

RAM Usage Limit—allows you to set your preference for optimizing application performance for your projects.

I don't know about windows but on my iMac the limit can be set to higher than the installed RAM (to 64GB with 32 GB is installed) so obviously the OS enforces its own limit in addition to whatever can be set in the app.

[v_kyr]

As said it depends how it is implemented for the Affinity apps themself here (which we don't know), beside that the OS always has and should have the overall control for all running processes and the memory management.