Computer hard crashes and reboots while using Affinity Designer on Windows 10

[alrine]

About once an hour while using Affinity designer, my computer crashes and reboots. I do not have this issue when using any other program, including graphics-intensive video games. 

I have attempted to disable hardware acceleration, and this has not helped. Because this is the entire computer crashing, and not just the program, I do not have crash logs I can upload. This used to happen occasionally (maybe twice a month), but now is happening multiple times a day, about every hour of use. 

[Komatös]

Hello @alrine and welcome to the forum.

If the computer crash and restart, you have a faulty driver or a Windows system componet that is missed or defect. Install the latest graphics card driver, but before, uninstall the old with DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller).

If this doesn't helps, you should scan Windows system components with sfc. To do so press Windows + X, choose CMD (Administrator), type sfc /scannow and press return.

 

[DWright]

Hi @alrine,

If you get blue crash screen there will be a description of the cause of the crash most commonly it will be an outdated driver that causes the issue.

[alrine]

Thank you for the replies. I upgraded my graphics card before making this thread, but had not uninstalled the old with DDU. I will try that. 

Unfortunately, I'm not getting a blue screen, it just restarts, almost like it's cutting power. If it wasn't exclusive to Affinity I'd think it was a faulty power supply. I'm going to run Prime95 today to stress test my system and rule out other hardware issues.

 

I'm also running sfc/ scannow.

[alrine]

sfc /scannow showed no problems, and running prime95 for more than an hour did not crash my system. It definitely seems to be an interaction with Affinity.

[alrine]

I believe I've found the issue. 

Looking at task manager while running Affinity shows that interacting with a large document (e.g. by scrolling) raises power consumption to Very High. I'm guessing that what is happening is my PSU (1000 Watts) is being overdrawn, leading the the system crash with no blue screen or crash report. 

 

I'll look into upgrading my PSU. I'm assuming there are performance upgrades Affinity could make as well to address this issue, but it does not seem to be widespread. Feel free to close this thread.

[alrine]

This is still happening very frequently. I see some crash reports, maybe these will help?

e9976ac0-4450-4531-8547-29b46eeca1bb.dmp 1a98269a-9efe-45cd-97d3-72b1a63158c4.dmp

[Abbas Jaffary]

I am experiencing exactly this same thing.  Have you had any luck addressing the issue?

It began happening a few days ago -- I thought perhaps it was recent updates & reboots, but it happened again today right as I was using Affinity, scrolling just as described above.

However, I was putting together a much larger document a few weeks ago in Affinity, with more applications running in the background, and I had no problems whatsoever.  Can temperature influence this?  When it's colder outside, it definitely affects my work environment.  It's warmed up slightly, and I wonder if that's pushing CPU/GPU temps beyond safety.  I don't know how else to measure this while Affinity is running.

[alrine]

What solved it for me was running the application in Administrator mode. It makes a few things more frustrating (can't drag and drop files in from explorer), but it solves the crashing. I'm not sure if this is because I have it installed on D drive while my Windows is on c  : or something else entirely, but it's an annoying issue. I haven't had the problem since running it exclusively in administrator mode.

[roskelld]

I’m getting the same issue. Today it’s happened twice and I believe the last action I did was to zoom in on the image I was working on. 
I think the idea of power draw could be correct, but this is not a power supply issue. I run some very intense programs and games, and no other program has ever caused an issue like this.