Affinity Photo Freezes with GPU Acceleration On

[Raphael Bonelli]

I was hoping that update 1.10 would solve my problem, but it didn't. 

Affinity Photo still freezes a lot with GPU Acceleration On, resulting in a greyed non-responsive app (since it don't fully crashes, just freezes and needs to be force closed, no crash log is created). 

All my drivers are fully updated, tried old and new drivers, and nothing solves the problem. 

 

DxDiag.txt

[Chris B]

Hey raphaelbonelli,

OpenCL should be working with your 1050Ti - However I do see a few complains about 1050's and 1060's not working well. 

Have you tried removing the driver and installing the new one? I don't just mean checking for updates. Sometimes removing the driver is the only way to fix this. 

[Raphael Bonelli]

Hi Chris... I'll try using the DDU to check. 
So far, i've only tried doing updates e installing over the old ones.

Thanks in advance.

[Raphael Bonelli]

I've removed all drivers using the DDU and installed them back. But Affinity Photo is still freezing. 

Something i've noticed, everytime Photo freezes, the GPU Memory usage is almost at max. 

[DigitalVisuals]

I can confirm this to.
I cannot use the display driver removing tool, because I have no second GPU on the system.  
So I have set OpenCL on hold.

[Chris B]

Thanks for trying that raphaelbonelli - I'm really sorry it did not work.

Both yourself and Studio97Visuals have a 1050 Ti and I'm sure a few other regular forum users have the same GPU, all of whom have issues.

I'm just trying to gather more info and do some more research and will get back to you soon.

 

[km.au]

I can confirm this happens on a Quadro P4000, and my notebook an Intel Iris Plus

 

Have yet to find out what causes the freeze

[Raphael Bonelli]

4 hours ago, Chris B said:

Thanks for trying that raphaelbonelli - I'm really sorry it did not work.

Both yourself and Studio97Visuals have a 1050 Ti and I'm sure a few other regular forum users have the same GPU, all of whom have issues.

I'm just trying to gather more info and do some more research and will get back to you soon.

 

Thanks. Let me know if I can help with anything else or any info or test.

[Chris B]

It could be that the kernels are being slow to compile. Your benchmark results are good but the bencmark test runs twice and caches the already compiled kernels which doesn't happen in general use with the app. 

I am stonished it doesn't appear to be driver related...

[Raphael Bonelli]

Any news about that problem with the 1050ti?

I've updated for the newest version of Affinity Photo, but it's still freezing when I use the GPU Acceleration.

[Gregory St. Laurent]

I was having the same problems with freezing with my GTX 1060, I determined that the nVidia 471.xx series of drivers were causing the issue, I installed the June 466.77 drivers and all my freezing issues went away. Latest drivers aren't always the best.

[RichardMH]

Have a look at the log file %APPDATA%\Affinity\Photo\1.0\Log.txt

[Raphael Bonelli]

14 hours ago, RichardMH said:

Have a look at the log file %APPDATA%\Affinity\Photo\1.0\Log.txt

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Installed
TabletContext::Create: original queue size is 50
TabletContext::Create: new queue size is 128
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Setting screen DPI to 109.10067114094 (scale = 1.0)
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Setting screen DPI to 109.10067114094 (scale = 1.0)
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Setting screen DPI to 109.10067114094 (scale = 1.0)
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Setting screen DPI to 109.10067114094 (scale = 1.0)
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Setting screen DPI to 109.10067114094 (scale = 1.0)
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Setting screen DPI to 109.10067114094 (scale = 1.0)
Exit
 

Log.txt

[Raphael Bonelli]

Just as an update.

After the new nVidia driver update, 472.12, it's still crashing under the same conditions (high use of GPU Memory).
No news is bad news.

[i5963c]

I'm also (although not very frequently) experiencing this kind of freezes on my system, whereby my memory is almost fully utilized (RAM and especially VRAM). I believe the fact that my GPU has 12 GB of dedicated RAM (compared to 4 GB for @raphaelbonelli) probably explains why I encounter this problem less frequent. But it happens from time to time (under different usage scenarios, and often - not always - when using brushes).

Afterwards, if I reopen the document that caused the system freeze, the amount of allocated memory is much lower again.

I assume that this may indicate that there are memory leaks in Affinity Photo. I've also logged a defect for this (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/150705-affinity-photo-hangs-after-doing-some-hdr-merges-panorama-stitching-memory-leaks/).

[Chris B]

Did you try the older 466.77 drivers that Gregory St. Laurent? 

It may also be worth trying to disable your Intel GPU from Device Manager. If OpenCL is failing, it might be dropping back and forth between hardware and software rendering.

[Raphael Bonelli]

I've tried a lot of older drivers, including 466.77 (always cleaning with DDU between installations).

When I disable the Intel GPU, I lose some functions on laptop monitor (like controlling it's brightness or callibration/profiling), but I'll try it anyway, at least for some time, to see if Affinity Photo stops crashing. 

[Chris B]

Just to clarify - I am not suggesting that you disable it permanently - I just want to see if that stops the app falling back to software which I think it might be doing.

[Raphael Bonelli]

21 minutes ago, Chris B said:

Just to clarify - I am not suggesting that you disable it permanently - I just want to see if that stops the app falling back to software which I think it might be doing.

I've did some quick crazy stress test with many layers, live filters, overlays and transformations. The vRam got very high and than lowered after sometime, Affinity Photo even got a little slow, but didn't crashed. I'll do some normal usage for some days and report back.

[i5963c]

@raphaelbonelli

Of course I don't know if the root cause of your system freezes is the same as my freezes (see my earlier reply in this post), but the symptoms are at least identical (i.e. almost exhausted RAM and VRAM).

I have no Intel GPU on my system, so I also can't deactivate it. Because I also encountered a number of unresponsive AP situations, I'm not sure whether the Intel GPU plays a key role in these freezes.

As a (temporary!) test, I've deactivated hardware acceleration (since 2 or 3 days). Since I've done that, I haven't witnessed system freezes anymore (although this does not mean that they can't popup again, I'll keep my fingers crossed for now...). 

Obviously, I remain hopeful that the freeze issue(s) will be solved in a structural way, without the need to deactivate features

FYI: I actually built a completely new system with a (quite expensive) GPU, (mainly) because the GPU of my previous system did not support HA in AP...

[Raphael Bonelli]

The temporary disabling of the Intel GPU on my notebook seems to solve the problem. vRam usage very high without crashing.

@Chris B- Do you think it's something that can be solved in a patch or update in the future, so I could use hardware accelation without disabling the Intel GPU?

[Chris B]

17 minutes ago, raphaelbonelli said:

The temporary disabling of the Intel GPU on my notebook seems to solve the problem. vRam usage very high without crashing.

@Chris B- Do you think it's something that can be solved in a patch or update in the future, so I could use hardware accelation without disabling the Intel GPU?

It's usually driver related. If the gpu is supported and it has drivers that are working correct, it should just work. 

If it isn't, there's something unique to the pc conig. causing the issue. 

Removing drivers and installing clean ones works for some and not others. 

I can't say if it will be fixed in a patch as I don't know if it's us or the config. 

You aren't losing anything per se by not using OpenCL, you just aren't getting the performance boost some people get. We do seem to see more OpenCL issues with the 10 series cards than we do with the 20 or 30 but that's probably because there's more of them. 

[Raphael Bonelli]

55 minutes ago, Chris B said:

You aren't losing anything per se by not using OpenCL, you just aren't getting the performance boost some people get. We do seem to see more OpenCL issues with the 10 series cards than we do with the 20 or 30 but that's probably because there's more of them. 

I understand. It's sad because I don't have any problem with other apps like Affinity Designer, Publisher, Capture One, DaVince Resolve or Blender, all of them heavy users of the GPU. But I also can understand the Dell sometimes don't make the things easier with their notebook, all customized, with custom drivers and things like that.

 

I'll reenable the Intel GPU and disable the GPU usage on Affinity Photo until further notice.

Thanks a lot!

[Chris B]

Hey raphaelbonelli,

As a last-ditch attempt at trying to sort this... I'd highly recommend trying to update the Intel driver. I have an Alienware laptop which is a Dell in a fancy shell and it was a nightmare back when we first launched Affinity with OpenCL. Essentially, Dell use their own update process which you may or may not be aware of and for some reason, it kept failing to update the Intel GPU correctly - I ended up doing a clean install to remove all the Dell software.

You could try uninstalling any driver software for the Intel GPU that Dell has installed/updated to and grab the drivers directly from intel. The Dell software may have just updated over the top (or not at all! Who knows with Dell!) so a clean install of the drivers might work.

[Raphael Bonelli]

2 hours ago, Chris B said:

You could try uninstalling any driver software for the Intel GPU that Dell has installed/updated to and grab the drivers directly from intel. The Dell software may have just updated over the top (or not at all! Who knows with Dell!) so a clean install of the drivers might work.

Thanks for the headsup Chris. Will be trying that today!

Already checked Intel drivers and there is a newer one.