Affinity Designers Lags on my MacBook Pro 16"

[MateuszGidaszewski]

Hey all, 

When I am using Affinity Designer and trying to draw there is a significant lag. Basically the tokes drag behind the cursor which makes it impossible to draw.

My laptop:

MacBook Pro 16, 2.3 8-Core Intel i9, 32GB DDR4, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB

MacOS: 11.2.3

AD 1.9.3

 

Any ideas ?

 

Cheers 

 

 

[Callum]

Hi Mateusz,

Welcome to the forums

Please could you go into the apps preferences and provide a screenshot of the performance tab?

Thanks

C

[MateuszGidaszewski]

Hey, 

I tried Metal, Open CL (Basic), and so far Open CL works the best.

Regards

M

[v_kyr]

See Preferences -> Performance options:

Quote

Performance options

• RAM Usage Limit—allows you to set your preference for optimising application performance for your projects.
• Disk Usage Warning At—choose the limit at which you are warned about disk usage.
• Undo Limit—choose the history length you are able to access.
• View Quality—choose the way in which the image displays during modifications. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Choose whether to dither gradients, when working on projects, to speed up performance.
• Choose a clipping option for optimising performance.
• File Recovery Interval—sets the interval for saving temporary data for currently open documents, allowing a document restore to be offered at startup if the app develops a fault.
• Display—Choose whether to use hardware acceleration such as Metal, OpenGL or OpenGL (Basic), or use Software acceleration. If your computer experiences performance problems, use the above option order until performance is acceptable. Metal requires Sierra macOS (10.12.x) and above, with Affinity optimised for High Sierra (10.13.x) and above. If your Mac has an additional discrete graphics card, checking the Use only integrated GPU will not allow access to it, therefore reducing power consumption and conserving battery life (useful for unplugged MacBook Pros).
• Retina Rendering—choose your rendering experience. Select from the pop-up menu.
  • Automatic (Best)—renders as non-retina followed by retina for balanced performance and quality.
  • Low quality (Fastest)—renders as non-retina only for highest performance level but compromises on quality.
  • High quality (Slowest)—renders as retina only for high quality but may compromise performance.
• Hardware Acceleration—checking Enable Metal compute acceleration boosts some tasks' performance if a compatible GPU is available. See the Hardware acceleration topic.

• Hardware acceleration

Usually using Metal API based hardware acceleration should be nowadays fine on the latest 16" Macbook Pro's hardware, at least for MacOS versions >= Sierra (10.12.x), but there might be some BigSur related issues since that OS version is still in a constantly evolutionary development process.