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Performance issues with Photo (Very slow)


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At first I thought my issues were limited to CR3 files, but now I'm having problems even with DNG files or working with large .afphoto files. 

The overall performance of Photo is extremely slow, almost impossible to get anything done quick. Photo seems to be using 20-30% CPU and 6GB - 8GB of memory out of 48 GB. When Photo is slow, CPU is working at 30-40% and memory is at 30-40% total. Yet, everything is exremely slow. 

For example, I started removing background from a photo which has a white background with an item on it. It started fast. I used flood tool to create an initial selection and then mask, and when I began cleaning up the mask with a brush tool everything began taking 10-15 seconds to render. I paint a line, it shows up 5-8 seconds later. 

What should have taken 5 min, taking me 20-30 min. I primarily use Designer and usually smaller files for the web, and never had these issues. But Photo has been giving me trouble with performance ever since I started using heavily with RAW files (25-35 MB). Develop persona takes 2 minutes to develop a photo.

A lot of the processing that Photo does also takes a while. For example, opening Haze Removal filter or Flood Fill Tool or Refine Selection, they can take 30 sec to 1 min to process.

While working in Photo, all other apps are slow too. For example, I can't watch a video tutorial in Chrome while Photo is open. Video plays very choppy.

I tried:

- Disabling OpenCL, which helps a tiny bit.
- Changing rending GPU from Intel to Quadro.
- Increasing memory for Photo. 

Here's what I got:

- Photo 1.9.2.1035
- Windows 10 x64
- Intel core i7-8665U CPU @ 190 GHz, 2112 Mhz, 4 cores, 8 logical processors
- 48 GB ram
- Intel UHD Graphics 620
- Nvidia Quadro P520
- Windows GPU scheduling in enabled

As far as I can tell, my system has more than enough resources and hardware to handle Photo and larger files. Yet, it's moving on a snail's back.

I couldn't even record a Loom screencast because the system was so slow, recording was very choopy. A 5 min recording was chopped up into 2 min video. You can see it here, it'll give you an idea of how bad it gets. The painting with a brush in the beginning over a mask is close to what I'm getting in real-time without Loom recording. 

Would appreciate any advice. I need to get some work done with a lot of images, but I can't be spending 30 min per photo.

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Hi @v1ktor,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

I can see in your screen recording that as soon as you begin to paint in Affinity, the GPU usage in Task Manager for 'Desktop Window Manager' jumps from > 1% to 75% and Affinity is seemingly choked for resources. There may be a few reasons for this, so please see my suggestions below.

Firstly I recommend making sure your GPU drivers are fully up to date, for both your Intel and Nvidia card - as outdated GPU drivers can cause performance issues in Affinity, even with Hardware Acceleration disabled. We recommend performing a full 'clean installation', which removes all old drivers from your system. You can do this using DDU (linked below) and then install the latest drivers as usual -

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Please visit the manufactures link below to download the latest driver available -

- Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html
- Nvidia: https://www.geforce.com/drivers 

Note: you may need to go direct to your PC manufactures website for the driver, if you see a warning regarding 'OEM drivers' when trying to install one from the above sites.

Once downloaded and installed, please restart your computer and then launch the Affinity app again and try a few tests.

If you're still seeing the same slowdown - could you please provide a screenshot of your settings under Edit > Preferences > Performance for me?

I have found multiple Microsoft Support threads and third party websites offering suggestions on how to fix the high GPU usage by DWM, please see the page linked below which covers these suggestions - 

https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmanager/desktop-window-manager-high-gpu.html

Please do let me know how you get on here :)

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@Dan C Thanks Dan. I will run some tests and see if Desktop Window Manager is the problem. One thing to note here, Desktop Windows Manager and other Windows processes seem to only use GPU - 0 (which is the built-in Intel GPU). While Photo is set to use Nvidia GPU as its renderer. Although I've tested both, Intel and Nvidia GPUs, and performance didn't change much. 

My drivers should be up-to-date, but I'll double check. I've had to do a clean install of the Nvidia drivers not too long ago due to some issues.

This is what I have right now in the performance section of preferences. This is also what they were when I recorded the video.

I'll report back any findings.

e2d8baf2-ca9c-4a4d-8416-3dc1075f9c3e.png

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No problem at all, thanks for confirming that for me!

10 hours ago, v1ktor said:

One thing to note here, Desktop Windows Manager and other Windows processes seem to only use GPU - 0 (which is the built-in Intel GPU). While Photo is set to use Nvidia GPU as its renderer. Although I've tested both, Intel and Nvidia GPUs, and performance didn't change much. 

As DWM isn't designed to be using this much resources from either chip, I suspect that the Intel driver may be causing issues with DWM, which in turn are affecting Affinity - but hopefully this can be confirmed by removing and installing new Intel drivers :)

10 hours ago, v1ktor said:

This is what I have right now in the performance section of preferences. This is also what they were when I recorded the video.

Please can you try changing the following options:

View Quality - Nearest Neighbour

Renderer WARP

Retina Rendering Low Quality (fastest)

Once changed, restart the app and try editing your document once again - does this help speed up the process for you?

Note in changing the Renderer to WARP we're essentially removing all rendering from the Graphics Card and using software (through your CPU) only to display the document. This may mean the app is not as fast as it could be on your PC, but I'd like to test this option to see if removing the GPU from the equation speeds things up considerably.

Once we confirm that, we can look to try and resolve that whilst re-enabling GPU rendering :)

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