Affinity Designer Crashes upon New file or open file

[DanIsDTM]

I am getting extremely frustrated with this as I use Affinity Designer ALOT... All of a sudden, I can't open ANY affinity file OR start a NEW document in Affinity Designer. The program just freezes and crashes any time I try to do either task when opening the application. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling countless times. Tried removing local user app data and rebuilding numerous times. Tried creating a completely different user on the PC to no avail. I even went to the lengths of purchasing the Win10 version from the windows store hoping that would give a different result and it did the exact same thing as well. My graphics drivers are all up to date, and I have a RTX 3080 with an i7 processor and 32GB of RAM. Can someone please help me with this as I'm getting extremely frustrated that I can't do anything.

[DanIsDTM]

To add to this... I have discovered that turning off Hardware Acceleration doesn't help, but changing the Renderer to Warp fixes the issue. However, this is NOT a good solution at all as this just makes the program use my CPU instead of the GPU to run the program and bogs down the CPU. Does anyone have a solution for why this would not work on a RTX 3080 with the most recent driver updates installed?

[carl123]

Are the crashes generating any crash reports?

If so, you may want to upload one for the Devs to look at

[ashf]

Try 1.9.4 beta. this will be installed separately from the stable release version.

 

[Komatös]

@ashf He cannot use a beta because it was purchased from the Windows Store.

@DanIsDTM If Designer crashes there must be crashreports! Please press Windows key + R. Type %appdata%\affinity\Designer\1.0 (store)\crashreports\reports and click OK.

Attach the .dmp file with latest timestamp to your next posting here. Also the log.txt, you can find in ...\1.0 (store} folder will be fine.

 

Be sure your system is'nt overclocked. What GPU driver is installed? The game ready or the studio driver? 

[Dan C]

Hi @DanIsDTM,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums 

7 hours ago, DanIsDTM said:

All of a sudden, I can't open ANY affinity file OR start a NEW document in Affinity Designer. The program just freezes and crashes any time I try to do either task when opening the application

We've seen this happen previously and it is almost always caused by outdated/corrupted GPU drivers.

I recommend visiting the Nvidia website and downloading the latest drivers available from here. When installing, please select the 'Custom' install option and then make sure to 'Perform a clean installation' as this will remove all traces of old GPU drivers from your system, that may be interfering with Affinity.

Once installed, restart your PC and then launch the Affinity app once again. Has this stopped the crashing for you?

3 hours ago, Komatös said:

He cannot use a beta because it was purchased from the Windows Store.

This is incorrect, any Affinity users can access the beta, provided they have purchased the app from either the Affinity Store, Mac App Store or Windows Store - although as above the beta should not be a necessity here!

[Komatös]

Ah, good to know. My level of knowledge was different.

[DanIsDTM]

18 hours ago, carl123 said:

Are the crashes generating any crash reports?

If so, you may want to upload one for the Devs to look at

It's not creating any crash reports... The application just freezes when I either select a new document to start OR try opening a document.

[DanIsDTM]

18 hours ago, ashf said:

Try 1.9.4 beta. this will be installed separately from the stable release version.

 

I just downloaded the beta, and it does the exact same thing that the retail version does on both the Windows store and .exe version does.

[DanIsDTM]

16 hours ago, Komatös said:

@ashf He cannot use a beta because it was purchased from the Windows Store.

@DanIsDTM If Designer crashes there must be crashreports! Please press Windows key + R. Type %appdata%\affinity\Designer\1.0 (store)\crashreports\reports and click OK.

Attach the .dmp file with latest timestamp to your next posting here. Also the log.txt, you can find in ...\1.0 (store} folder will be fine.

 

Be sure your system is'nt overclocked. What GPU driver is installed? The game ready or the studio driver? 

So... I have actually purchased BOTH the Windows store version and the Desktop application version. The desktop app was what I always used since I bought it in 2016. I did recently upgrade my PC that has the RTX 3080 in it and that has been when I have had issues with Affinity only. The system is NOT overclocked as I have disabled all overclocking. There are NO crash reports in the crash reports folder. The application simply freezes any time I try to open a file or create a new file and it must be force closed. I have always had the game ready drivers installed and it is currently on the most current version from a clean installation (466.47 version)... But I had also tried the most recent studio driver fresh installed yesterday as well and that did not work either.

[DanIsDTM]

12 hours ago, Dan C said:

Hi @DanIsDTM,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums 

We've seen this happen previously and it is almost always caused by outdated/corrupted GPU drivers.

I recommend visiting the Nvidia website and downloading the latest drivers available from here. When installing, please select the 'Custom' install option and then make sure to 'Perform a clean installation' as this will remove all traces of old GPU drivers from your system, that may be interfering with Affinity.

Once installed, restart your PC and then launch the Affinity app once again. Has this stopped the crashing for you?

This is incorrect, any Affinity users can access the beta, provided they have purchased the app from either the Affinity Store, Mac App Store or Windows Store - although as above the beta should not be a necessity here!

@Dan CThat did not fix the issue. I had already done a clean installation of both the most recent studio driver AND game-ready driver for the RTX 3080. Neither driver worked as it still did the same thing of freezing when trying to open a file or create a new file. It requires me to force close and it never loads the workspace. Also, I have tried the beta version as well today and it does the exact same thing as the current retail version.

[DanIsDTM]

@Dan CI've also done some more testing on this as well... I'm able to KEEP Hardware Acceleration enabled "Enable OpenCL compute acceleration" on but the Renderer has to be set to WARP still & it doesn't crash with that... That does take SOME of the load off of the CPU, but it's obviously still not optimal to not be able to use the GPU for the rendering.

[ashf]

Do you know when you updated the GPU driver?
Sometimes the latest driver could be cause of the problem.

Recent AMD driver had compatibility problem with Affinity and solution was to install a little older driver.

[ashf]

Also the Studio Driver could be a solution instead of the Gaming Driver.

[DanIsDTM]

53 minutes ago, ashf said:

Also the Studio Driver could be a solution instead of the Gaming Driver.

I've tried studio driver clean install as well. Same issue.

1 hour ago, ashf said:

Do you know when you updated the GPU driver?
Sometimes the latest driver could be cause of the problem.

Recent AMD driver had compatibility problem with Affinity and solution was to install a little older driver.

I actually had a version a couple of versions old and then I upgraded to the latest version to try to fix it. It had worked in the past with (then) current drivers.

[Dan C]

12 hours ago, DanIsDTM said:

That did not fix the issue. I had already done a clean installation of both the most recent studio driver AND game-ready driver for the RTX 3080. Neither driver worked as it still did the same thing of freezing when trying to open a file or create a new file. It requires me to force close and it never loads the workspace. Also, I have tried the beta version as well today and it does the exact same thing as the current retail version.

Thanks for trying that and I'm certainly sorry to hear this!

12 hours ago, DanIsDTM said:

I'm able to KEEP Hardware Acceleration enabled "Enable OpenCL compute acceleration" on but the Renderer has to be set to WARP still & it doesn't crash with that... That does take SOME of the load off of the CPU, but it's obviously still not optimal to not be able to use the GPU for the rendering.

As I understand it, changing the Renderer to WARP will use the CPU to draw the canvas and will stop using your GPU. As far as I'm aware, this means that Hardware Acceleration will only be used to speed up certain actions, such as applying live filters, even though the CPU is doing the final 'draw' to screen.

This also would confirm to us that it's the GPU/drivers that Affinity is struggling with currently, if the application is working as expected in WARP mode - though I'm still not certain for the exact cause of this.

Can you please open the below link and follow the steps provided to generate an event viewer log and your log.txt file, with the Renderer set to your GPU and Hardware Acceleration enabled?

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/142524-crash-crash-crash/&tab=comments#:~:text=generating crash reports.-,We're going to need to locate a different file%2C as,Many thanks in advance!,-Quote

Can you also please confirm for me, do you have both your iGPU (Intel) and dGPU (Nvidia) enabled through device manager?

Many thanks once again

[DanIsDTM]

12 hours ago, Dan C said:

Thanks for trying that and I'm certainly sorry to hear this!

As I understand it, changing the Renderer to WARP will use the CPU to draw the canvas and will stop using your GPU. As far as I'm aware, this means that Hardware Acceleration will only be used to speed up certain actions, such as applying live filters, even though the CPU is doing the final 'draw' to screen.

This also would confirm to us that it's the GPU/drivers that Affinity is struggling with currently, if the application is working as expected in WARP mode - though I'm still not certain for the exact cause of this.

Can you please open the below link and follow the steps provided to generate an event viewer log and your log.txt file, with the Renderer set to your GPU and Hardware Acceleration enabled?

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/142524-crash-crash-crash/&tab=comments#:~:text=generating crash reports.-,We're going to need to locate a different file%2C as,Many thanks in advance!,-Quote

Can you also please confirm for me, do you have both your iGPU (Intel) and dGPU (Nvidia) enabled through device manager?

Many thanks once again

I don't have an intel GPU on this machine... Only the Nvidia GPU which is enabled as it's the only option...

I have done as you asked. Set the Renderer back to the RTX 3080 & Hardware Acceleration on & then gathered the event viewer logs and Log txt file as well and attached them here. Looks like Event Viewer shows a "Application Hang" as the source from Affinity freezing.

events.evtx Log.txt

[DanIsDTM]

On 5/26/2021 at 9:04 PM, DanIsDTM said:

I don't have an intel GPU on this machine... Only the Nvidia GPU which is enabled as it's the only option...

I have done as you asked. Set the Renderer back to the RTX 3080 & Hardware Acceleration on & then gathered the event viewer logs and Log txt file as well and attached them here. Looks like Event Viewer shows a "Application Hang" as the source from Affinity freezing.

events.evtx 7.07 MB · 4 downloads Log.txt 1.35 kB · 4 downloads

@Dan CAny ideas after seeing the events and Log??

[Chris B]

Hey @DanIsDTM

Would you be able to follow the following steps to give us some more information please to investigate.

1. Download ProcDump from the following link - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/downloads/procdump 

2. Create a new folder on your desktop called ProcDump then extract the contents of the zip from the link above into this folder

3. Open Command Prompt (cmd from the Run dialog) type cd desktop\procdump  and press enter. 

4. Now paste the following string and press enter. Note this assumes you've installed to the default directory. If you have modified this then please update to reflect the install directory on your machine.

procdump64 -e -ma -accepteula -x . "C:\Program Files\Affinity\Designer\Designer.exe"

 

Once that has finished could you attach a screenshot of the command prompt window along with the newly generated DMP files in the ProcDump folder on your desktop please.