Affinity Photo - changing performance settings on Mac Mini M1?

[dotlyc]

I just purchased a Mac Mini M1 computer. I'd like to know if I should change the Affinity Photo performance settings in the preferences, specifically the RAM usage limit and the disk usage warning. I think they're set to the defaults -- 56320 MB for the RAM usage and 32768 MB for the disk usage warning.

My ancient 2014 Mini struggled to keep up with AP so I'm looking forward to a much faster performance on the M1 but I'm wondering if adjusting these settings would make a difference.

Thanks for any advice.

[Dan C]

Hi @dotlyc 

We have the following FAQ with suggestions to receive the best performance, please see this linked below - 

 

In regards to your specific machine, I'd recommend trying the following:

Ram Limit  - either 8192MB or 16384MB, depending on if you have 8GB or 16GB of RAM installed.

Disk Usage Warning - this is unlikely to affect performance, so please set this value to the maximum temporary disk space that you wish for Affinity to use when your RAM limit has been reached.

Undo Limit - I personally leave this at default 1024, any more than this and you may see performance drops, depending on your CPU & RAM & I have never found I needed to undo more that 1000 steps in one go!

View Quality - This can be left on Bilinear, but if you want every drop of performance from the app, try changing this to Nearest Neighbour.

Dither Gradients - Leave this option ticked

Use Precise Clipping - Leave unticked unless required

File Recovery Interval - Again I personally find 300 seconds is the right amount of time for this, but if you want a more/less frequent temporary-save, please change this as required.

Display - Metal

Use only integrated GPU - Leave unticked

Retina Rendering - Similar to View Quality, you can change this as required but I find Automatic to be preferable.

Hardware Acceleration - I recommend leaving this option ticked.

I hope this helps!

[dotlyc]

Hi, Dan:

Thanks for answering my question in such detail. Almost everything was at the settings you recommended. I did reduce the RAM limit to 16384 MB, but I don't understand exactly what effect reducing the RAM limit like this has on performance. I presume it would improve it?

I'm also not sure where to set the Disk Usage Warning. I've left it at 32768 MB for now, but I have 2 TB on my computer. Would it improve performance to increase or decrease that number? What would you recommend?

Thanks, Lydia

[Dan C]

No problem at all, more than happy to help!

On 6/26/2021 at 3:22 AM, dotlyc said:

I did reduce the RAM limit to 16384 MB, but I don't understand exactly what effect reducing the RAM limit like this has on performance. I presume it would improve it?

The RAM limit should be set to the maximum amount of RAM you have in your system, or lower. This is the amount of RAM that the Affinity application will use before it begins to write temporary data to disk. We recommend setting this to the amount of RAM you have in your system, as this will mean Affinity has access to as much of your system resources as possible.

On 6/26/2021 at 3:22 AM, dotlyc said:

I'm also not sure where to set the Disk Usage Warning. I've left it at 32768 MB for now, but I have 2 TB on my computer. Would it improve performance to increase or decrease that number? What would you recommend?

This setting decides how much of your disk space is used as temporary storage once your RAM has filled - this setting has very little control over performance and is more to allow you to decide how much temporary data the app can store. 32768MB is more than enough, in my opinion

[dotlyc]

Once again, thanks for the detailed information.

Since I wrote my last comment, I've had a chance to use Affinity to process images on my new M1 computer more intensively than I had before. I'm in awe of how fast everything is working compared to my 2014 computer. Topaz Denoise renders my images in a few seconds instead of several minutes. 😃