Using Affinity with 2 different GPUs?

[nitro912gr]

So after the lackluster openCL support for the RDNA 1 and above from AMD, I was looking for solutions on how to get affinity working without the need to drop like 350 euros on a same performing (in gaming/compute) nvidia 1660 to replace my 5500XT (which is great in games but...)

Looking a bit around the internet I did noticed that it is possible to run 2 different GPUs on the same windows system and having each to do specific tasks. Something that can solve the problem here because even an older Radeon 7790 (that I use in my office workstation) that works with affinity's openCL is faster than relying completely on the CPU (R5 2600 that is with the 5500XT on my home system).

Getting a second hand older radeon shouldn't be a problem, especially the ones with 1-2GB or VRAM that are not much desired those days.

So anyone here have tried it with affinity programs? Or anyone with a setup like this who can test without messing with their system?

[walt.farrell]

Are you asking whether the Affinity applications on Windows will make use of multiple GPUs, or whether you can restrict them to using a specific GPU if you have multiple GPUs?

The answer to the first should be yes, as the Benchmark function has a "combined GPU" section.

The answer to the second should also be yes. You can select a GPU for rendering in the Performance section of the application Preferences. That would handle part of it, but not all of it, I think. For the rest, you can also (I think) configure Windows to use a specific GPU for a specific application.

[DWright]

I have not tried this with two dedicated GPU but on my laptop I am able to switch between the integrated GPU and the dedicated GPU for the Affinity programs to use.

[nitro912gr]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Are you asking whether the Affinity applications on Windows will make use of multiple GPUs, or whether you can restrict them to using a specific GPU if you have multiple GPUs?

The answer to the first should be yes, as the Benchmark function has a "combined GPU" section.

The answer to the second should also be yes. You can select a GPU for rendering in the Performance section of the application Preferences. That would handle part of it, but not all of it, I think. For the rest, you can also (I think) configure Windows to use a specific GPU for a specific application.

yeah!

I know for sure that windows can, I have seen people having success even with one AMD and one nVidia at the same system. That other guy used AMD 290 for everything else while the nvidia 750 was computing for folding at home at the same time.

I expect with affinity to just select for "renderer" in performance options the appropriate card and being able for example to have the system with the AMD 5500XT and an AMD 7790, and use the first for gaming and the later for when I open affinity designer to work (yeah it is a low GPU but still get noticeable better performance than just CPU) .

So if this can work I may look for some GPU like an AMD 290 for my office system (the one on the signature) that will perform better than what I have now for like 100 euro or something.

[eqyizo]

On 5/1/2022 at 9:58 AM, nitro912gr said:

yeah!

I know for sure that windows can, I have seen people having success even with one AMD and one nVidia at the same system. That other guy used AMD 290 for everything else while the nvidia 750 was computing for folding at home at the same time.

I expect with affinity to just select for "renderer" in performance options the appropriate card and being able for example to have the system with the AMD 5500XT and an AMD 7790, and use the first for gaming and the later for when I open affinity designer to work (yeah it is a low GPU but still get noticeable better performance than just CPU) .

So if this can work I may look for some GPU like an AMD 290 for my office system (the one on the signature) that will perform better than what I have now for like 100 euro or something.

Did you ever get this to work? Affinity nearly bricked my AMD 6800, so I'm looking at running a cheap nvidia card for affinity and not be paranoid anymore. The programs always ran great on my nvidia laptop. I upgraded to an AMD desktop and it has been nothing but nightmares with Affinity now.

[nitro912gr]

No I did noticed that designer with the newer versions is running almost the same with or without GPU acceleration, as GPU acceleration mostly helps with rasters and I don't have many in my workflow with it, so I didn't bothered in the end. I did some calculations too on the PSU side and my corsair will probably get in trouble running anything more than I already have on the system, not to mention the GPU market is still a fine mess of overpriced crap.

I was hoping that now with intel GPUs out and crypto going crushing we could get back at normal pricing but nope... amd and nvidia had other ideas about it and as of that below 100 euros that I'm willing to spent right now there is nothing worth my time or money at all.

What nightmares do you have? I run fine without the GPU at home, it could get better sure with GPU acceleration but my R5 2600 can handle affinity and affinity is leagues above in performance than illustrator I was using before. Are you sure it is related to the GPU?

[eqyizo]

My screen goes black when using any of the affinity apps at random. Someone else posted this problem with the same gpu I have, saying it was crashing the drivers. It usually turns back on after a minute or so when windows realizes it crashed. But last night it didn't turn back on. I tried restarting my computer many times and my screen would never show. After a few hours, however, it finally turned on. But it was lagging, so I checked device manager and it wasn't using the gpu at all. I had to uninstall the device/drivers for it to work again. I thought it bricked my gpu for a while there, and I'm still worried that it could.

In theory, if I ran a cheapish nvidia as the primary, this wouldn't happen, and assign my amd to handle apps that can utilize it (literally everything except affinity). But that's a somewhat costly theory, so I thought I'd ask first.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, eqyizo said:

My screen goes black when using any of the affinity apps at random. Someone else posted this problem with the same gpu I have, saying it was crashing the drivers. It usually turns back on after a minute or so when windows realizes it crashed. But last night it didn't turn back on. I tried restarting my computer many times and my screen would never show. After a few hours, however, it finally turned on. But it was lagging, so I checked device manager and it wasn't using the gpu at all. I had to uninstall the device/drivers for it to work again. I thought it bricked my gpu for a while there, and I'm still worried that it could.

In theory, if I ran a cheapish nvidia as the primary, this wouldn't happen, and assign my amd to handle apps that can utilize it (literally everything except affinity). But that's a somewhat costly theory, so I thought I'd ask first.

Have you discussed the GPU driver crashes with AMD? The drivers are responsible for isolating themselves from application-level programs like the Affinity applications, and for properly sanitizing any inputs they use from the applications. If there's a crash in the drive, it's AMD's fault and responsibility to fix.

[debraspicher]

52 minutes ago, eqyizo said:

My screen goes black when using any of the affinity apps at random. Someone else posted this problem with the same gpu I have, saying it was crashing the drivers. It usually turns back on after a minute or so when windows realizes it crashed. But last night it didn't turn back on. I tried restarting my computer many times and my screen would never show. After a few hours, however, it finally turned on. But it was lagging, so I checked device manager and it wasn't using the gpu at all. I had to uninstall the device/drivers for it to work again. I thought it bricked my gpu for a while there, and I'm still worried that it could.

In theory, if I ran a cheapish nvidia as the primary, this wouldn't happen, and assign my amd to handle apps that can utilize it (literally everything except affinity). But that's a somewhat costly theory, so I thought I'd ask first.

On top of what @walt.farrell stated, if it is a driver crash out, it will show up in Event Viewer as such but also it should recover to a "safe mode" driver that won't have acceleration, but your display should come back. It should give you a delightful message alerting you to this behavior in Windows each time.

The way to check if it is hardware-related would be to stress test it with something like Fur mark and keep an eye on it overtime for crashes. That could completely kill the card though so I don't recommend unless you have an adequate replacement lined up.

You could try re-seating the card and that you are not using daisy chained PCIE power (for 2x connections). AMD drivers don't talk nicely with Affinity to begin with. The thread I linked is extensive, but in short, the cards are not pushed to their limit based on poor driver support, so hard to say how "stressful" the programs really are on the cards.

However, Affinity loves loves loves VRAM... so if your VRAM is on the way out, that could be explaining the intermittent issue(s) you are having.

[debraspicher]

On 5/1/2022 at 3:21 AM, nitro912gr said:

So after the lackluster openCL support for the RDNA 1 and above from AMD, I was looking for solutions on how to get affinity working without the need to drop like 350 euros on a same performing (in gaming/compute) nvidia 1660 to replace my 5500XT (which is great in games but...)

Looking a bit around the internet I did noticed that it is possible to run 2 different GPUs on the same windows system and having each to do specific tasks. Something that can solve the problem here because even an older Radeon 7790 (that I use in my office workstation) that works with affinity's openCL is faster than relying completely on the CPU (R5 2600 that is with the 5500XT on my home system).

Getting a second hand older radeon shouldn't be a problem, especially the ones with 1-2GB or VRAM that are not much desired those days.

So anyone here have tried it with affinity programs? Or anyone with a setup like this who can test without messing with their system?

VRAM is increasingly important for 2D. I don't recommend to skimp on it as that may just introduce another bottleneck. I'm using 12GB and I've almost filled it at times with editing one simple RAW, having multiple Affinity apps up and running. I'm sure other things as well, but Affinity takes a mighty big chunk out of GPU memory. 1-2 it would gobble up no problem. Basically, I know never to have these apps open anymore if I do decide to run a game.

The benefit of adding another card as a secondary and setting it to primary renderer in Affinity though is theoretically it will have sole discretion of its VRAM, so there is that. We don't know what the OS does with memory management with two dedicated cards (probably not hard to google). Laptops might be a different story entirely.

[nitro912gr]

1 hour ago, eqyizo said:

My screen goes black when using any of the affinity apps at random. Someone else posted this problem with the same gpu I have, saying it was crashing the drivers. It usually turns back on after a minute or so when windows realizes it crashed. But last night it didn't turn back on. I tried restarting my computer many times and my screen would never show. After a few hours, however, it finally turned on. But it was lagging, so I checked device manager and it wasn't using the gpu at all. I had to uninstall the device/drivers for it to work again. I thought it bricked my gpu for a while there, and I'm still worried that it could.

In theory, if I ran a cheapish nvidia as the primary, this wouldn't happen, and assign my amd to handle apps that can utilize it (literally everything except affinity). But that's a somewhat costly theory, so I thought I'd ask first.

Make sure you don't have a problem with the HDMI cable, a friend of mine had some shitty cheap HDMI cable that did the same, took us a little while and almost sent the cards back for RMA before we figure it out.

I also get black screens lately but I have confirmed by using the AMD Link on my phone, that can mirror my monitor there, that the problem is in fact the monitor and it blacks out for some reason (probably die, because I changed HDMI cable and still happens here).

9 minutes ago, debraspicher said:

VRAM is increasingly important for 2D. I don't recommend to skimp on it as that may just introduce another bottleneck. I'm using 12GB and I've almost filled it at times with editing one simple RAW, having multiple Affinity apps up and running. I'm sure other things as well, but Affinity takes a mighty big chunk out of GPU memory. 1-2 it would gobble up no problem. Basically, I know never to have these apps open anymore if I do decide to run a game.

The benefit of adding another card as a secondary and setting it to primary renderer in Affinity though is theoretically it will have sole discretion of its VRAM, so there is that. We don't know what the OS does with memory management with two dedicated cards (probably not hard to google). Laptops might be a different story entirely.

Well in theory there is also the shared memory that the GPU can use from the RAM in a case like this. But I have never seen the GPU utilize that RAM on task manager.