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Unsafe Loads w/ Affinity Photo, Windows 11


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When working on projects today I noticed that Affinity had begun flickering while I was using a brush to alter a mask. It seemed to be solely the program rather than my whole monitor. In addition, when using the brush, the brightness seemed to flicker slightly. Later, when adjusting text, my monitor turned black and the program had hard-crashed (no error message of any sort) after it came back on, showing my desktop. I opened the program again and it had a bad lag when launching. I tried to open the project again and move a text frame, at which point my monitor went black, went between frames of grey and black (while sound was still playing - I was conversing with peers over a call), before my computer crashed entirely and went back to the boot screen. Boot-up was normal. No other issues with any other programs; performance issues are isolated to Affinity photo.

image.png.00f4e1a82e9490159fa895901f4a42de.pngThis is my GPU load just when launching (disabling hardware acceleration generally stopped this, but I had a more solitary spike in my CPU load instead).

With hardware acceleration on, moving assets, including images and text frames (with maybe 5 non-complex layers total, all but two masks), GPU load abnormally went from about 65% to 95%, generally plateauing at around 69-70% while CPU load hovered at around 50%. Sometimes, GPU load stuck at 100%.

With hardware acceleration off, GPU load hovered at 20-30%, but CPU load instantly spiked to 100% and stayed there, even when only slightly moving assets.

Therefore, Affinity is using unsafe loads with hardware acceleration turned on and off, and is unusable in it's current state without risk to my device.

This isn't normal, obviously. I've used Affinity on devices that don't necessarily meet specifications (even on an I3 chip w/out hardware acceleration) without problems like these, and after benchmarking with several other GPU heavy programs, I experienced no problems remotely the same to this and GPU load generally stuck to about 30%. There are no issues with airflow or heating on my computer either, even while these issues are happening.

I'm running windows 11, and some crucial specifications are as follows:

CPU: 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11700F @ 2.50GHz, 8 Core
RAM: 16gb
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

 

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Hi @ryderand Welcome to the Forums,

I've tried this on my laptop with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and haven't been able to replicate the issue.  Would you mind attaching your afphoto file with your Mask and i'll see i can replicate the issue with that.

I'll see if we have a RTX 3060 Ti in the office, which i'm sure we do.  Also could you attach your log.txt file, to find this call up the Windows run box by holding down the Windows key and tapping the letter R.  In the run box enter:
%appdata%\Affinity\Photo\1.0

Then click okay and that will open a folder.  You should see a file called log.txt, please attach that here :) 

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Sure thing. Attached are the following files. One in which I experienced the issue, the other in which I replicated it. These are pretty simply mock-ups using art, masks, and text, and there are very few layers. It should be self-explanatory at a glance. Let me know if there's any other sort of benchmark you need me to provide.

It should be said that I attempted a reinstall between the crash itself and making this thread; this did not help and the issues have persisted. Again, only in Affinity.

LoureInline.afphoto LeoFantasyInline.afphoto Log.txt

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Hi @ryder,

I can see what you mean about the 'flickering' brightness, that seems to be caused by the Dp3dx6a.png layer in the LoureInline.afphoto, if you disable that layer and then work on the Mask, you don't get the flickering.  I think that will just be that layer redrawing and is likely expected, it also the same happens on my MacBook. As for Windows, I couldn't get my GPU to go above 24% while working on the mask.

One thing i did notice from the Log.txt you should have a driver update to install from Nvidia, could you install the later update and when running the update select the option for Custom (Advanced) then tick the box Perform a clean installation.  Once thats done, try using Affinity again and let me know the results :) 

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I should note that I am experiencing a couple kinds of flickering when working in Affinity, which are isolated to the workspace: The brightness seems to very subtly increase and decrease, even off the canvas. And then, it flickers with black frames - again, the workspace/window in which the file is displayed, but not, for example, an overlaid window or my Windows taskbar.

Disabling Dp3dx6a.png does not prevent this from happening, and working on the mask with this disabled still spikes my GPU load to around 50%, which is still abnormal.

I will, however, go through the driver update and get back to you on that front. I am using Nvidia's "Studio Driver", which on my end appears to be up to date (ver. 511.65, release date 02/01/2022). Another driver that's available is "GeForce Game Ready Driver" which is at ver. 511.79, release date 02/14/2022. Which of these should I run a clean install of? Up to this point, I have always had the "Studio Driver" installed.

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14 minutes ago, ryder said:

511.79, release date 02/14/2022. Which of these should I run a clean install of? Up to this point, I have always had the "Studio Driver" installed.

I'm using 511.79.  But as soon as i'm back from lunch i'll install the Studio Driver and see if i can replicate it with that.  So for now, no need to uninstall anything unless you want to see if you get different results with the Game Ready Driver.

I'll look out for the brightness issue again once i'm using the StudioDrive :) 

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@ryder That's actually one of the biggest problems of all Affinity apps — enormous and absolutely inexplicable resources usage even for the most basic operations.

I'm using macOS and I can tell you: once I start moving an artboard in Designer with some text and image layers on it, CPU load instantly goes up from 0 to 1200% of 1600% available. That's happening on a quite powerful Intel Core i9-9900k with 8 cores and 16 threads. For just moving an artboard with text layer and image layer — that's too much. No other graphic design apps behave this way.

Same happening in Publisher and Photo. Insane CPU load on the very basic operations. CPU temperature instantly goes from 35º to 65º. And I have a very good cooling system.

And while I understand that having the potential of being able to fully utilize machine's hardware capabilities is good for really heavy project files (it will speed up things, sure), using it all the time even for the most basic operations is very wrong and potentially harmful. That leads me to conclusion that there are very little load-balancing optimizations at all.

Never understood why it "eats" so much...

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2 hours ago, ryder said:

I should note that I am experiencing a couple kinds of flickering when working in Affinity, which are isolated to the workspace: The brightness seems to very subtly increase and decrease, even off the canvas. And then, it flickers with black frames - again, the workspace/window in which the file is displayed, but not, for example, an overlaid window or my Windows taskbar.

 

Can you let me know what monitor you are using and do you have G-sync enabled?  That has been known to cause some flicking.

For the performance issue, do you have a lot of assets saved to your Assets Studio that also include Live Filters?

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8 hours ago, stokerg said:

Can you let me know what monitor you are using and do you have G-sync enabled?  That has been known to cause some flicking.

For the performance issue, do you have a lot of assets saved to your Assets Studio that also include Live Filters?

image.png.4e09d58c7c649320a5901fe618e63889.png None.

 

The monitor I'm using does have G-Sync: It's a LG 27GL63T 27" monitor. I've disabled G-Sync and don't appear to be suffering the flickering issue anymore, but GPU load is still inexplicably high.

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Hi @ryder,

Thats good that disabling G-sync has stopped the flickering.

For the performance side of things, are you actually experiencing any slow downs in the app?  Also a strange a question as it might be, whats your mouse polling rate set to?  Just we have seen a high polling rate with some mice can cause spikes in GPU/CPU.

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My mouse's polling rate is 1000hz, I think. That's not necessarily something I know how to identify besides checking the product page; it's a Logitech G305, wireless. I don't see spikes anywhere else in relation to rapid mouse movement. (Maybe 1-5% CPU usage). The app sometimes slows down, yes, which doesn't seem reasonable for my equipment. At times I can get smooth usage but the GPU/CPU usage will still be spiking (Hardware Accel. on or off). These weren't issues I was having on a much, much older machine, where I used Affinity for years.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm having another issue now when creating a new document. This usually happens after not having used the program, at least since the latest boot-up. The entire screen goes black for a moment before showing me my workspace again. Generally, the program seems to lag just being open as well. Dialogue boxes don't open and close smoothly for example.

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Additionally, I've installed the latest Nvidia Driver on a clean install, using the "Game Ready" driver instead of the "Studio" driver. It is up to date as per the time of this post. No change in performance issues.

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