Poor performance on M1 Macs

[nbiefeld]

I think it is memory related.  On two M1 macs (Mac Mini and the new iMac), I am getting beach balls every minute or two minutes.  Even on a 100x100 image with no layers.  Does something need to be configured?  App was installed a few days ago, no configurations or add-ins (if there is any).  Its just core Affinity Photo install from the App Store.

 

Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM - Beach Balls

iMac with 8GB of RAM - Beach Balls

Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM - No Beach Balls

Is 16GB of RAM a requirement, or is there something I can configure to make the other two Macs perform nicely?  I don't need to work on large images, or large amounts of layers so 8GB of RAM suits my needs with Photoshop and Illustrator.  The iMac is brand new, where the 8GB Mac Mini was purchased when it launched.

[stokerg]

Hi @nbiefeld,

This isn't something i've seen reported before with the M1 Mac.  I know a member of the Tech Team has an M1 MacBook and hasn't reported anything like this.  

Could you open Affinity Photo on one of the M1 Mac's, close the Welcome screen and don't open an image or start a new document and instead click Help>Benchmark if you can take a screenshot of the results and post them here, that would be a big help.

Also it would be worth downloading the beta from here and seeing if you have the same problems.

[Nnooo]

As posted on twitter here.

This might be me but I am finding it takes 10 minutes to open a single affinity designer file on my M1 16GB MacBook Pro?

The file has the same 260mb tiff repeated (linked file) about 20 times on different art boards. 

Main reason is so I can batch export a variety of versions of my artwork easily.

Is there maybe something I am missing that might help me optimise the file size?

This one (see the twitter link for the image) only has 6 art boards with the same image on it and it still takes 10 mins to load?

The base file is 884mb 8bit uncompressed Tiff