Strange memory management with Hardware Acceleration ON?

[i5963c]

After upgrading to Affinity Photo 1.10.3. yesterday, I (temporarily) reenabled hardware acceleration on my machine, to verify whether some freeze problems that I encountered recently were solved with the latest release. The findings of my earlier tests with previous releases are documented in detail in a different thread (https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/150705-affinity-photo-hangs-after-doing-some-hdr-merges-panorama-stitching-memory-leaks/).

Unfortunately, the freezes are still there😡...

While I'm testing problems with AP, I focus particularly on how AP manages memory, because my feeling (suspicion) is that something is broken there.

During my latest tests after installing the 1.10.3 release, I noticed something strange.

In my AP Preferences, the 'RAM Usage Limit' is set to 16383MB (see screenshot below):

 

In total, I have 32 GB of physical RAM (and 12 GB of VRAM).

When running some test cases, I verified the memory consumption via the 'Processes' tab of the Windows Task Manager. There, I saw that the memory consumed by Affinity Photo raised till levels above 27 GB (see screenshot below):

How is this possible, when the parameter in the AP Preferences (Performance tab) restricts the RAM usage to 16 GB??

The reason why I find this bizarre (and why I report it separately) is that such situations with high RAM/VRAM usage are typically (i.e. very often!) a precursor for system freezes shortly afterwards.

 

PS: When I disabled hardware acceleration later on again, it appears that I can't reach the same levels of excessive RAM usage. Then, AP rather obeys the constraint of the Preferences parameter, although sometimes with a small surpass. From my earlier tests (see also link above), I've learned that there appears to exist a mechanism that kicks in once the RAM limit is approached. That mechanism seems to release RAM. Indeed, With HW acceleration switched OFF, AP behaves (in general) relatively stable.

With HW acceleration ON, such memory release mechanism doesn't seem to happen (or at least not always in a timely manner)...

 

[Callum]

Hi i5963c,

This is something that has been reported in the past and is currently logged with our developers to be investigated further I will update this thread once I have more information.

Thanks
C

[i5963c]

@Callum,

Thanks for the feedback.

I checked the other thread that is linked to the same apl number (apl-758).

It refers to an old message of February 2021 that describes a similar issue with a beta of Affinity Publisher. This message has 1 reply from Serif. In this reply it is stated that the 'RAM Usage Limit' is only applicable for raster operations, and that Affinity Publisher (contrary to Photo and Designer) can use lots of memory for 'other things'. 

I don't know what these 'other things' could be.

But, please be aware that the findings of my message above refer to Affinity Photo, and that I notice this memory behavior while I only use rasterized features in Affinity Photo (i.e. no fonts, no shapes, no curves,... -> so, nothing 'vectorized').

I really hope that the developers can identify and fix the root cause of this issue. It's basically the only major problem that I have with Affinity Photo, and it prevents me from activating hardware acceleration. Indeed, when HA is active on my system, I encounter no 'crashes', which is different from what many other users are facing with recent versions. I only have system 'freezes' from time to time, and these freezes are in almost 100% of the occurrences linked to exhaustion of the available memory.