How can you speed up performance and stop Affinity Photo from hanging?

[S J Damson]

Hi All

I've recently just ordered 32GB of RAM for my laptop as I was getting fed up of Affinity Photo crashing frequently whenever I worked on RAW files or applied a Sharpening or Blur filter to an image.

However it has just occurred to me that some of you might have other suggestions for optimizing performance without spending the big bucks.  IT could be that better hardware is the only way go but it could be I'm doing something wrong and buying the extra Ram was a mistake.

Just for reference my current setup is as follows:

• Operating System: Windows 10
• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz   1.80 GHz
• RAM: 8GB
• Graphics: NVIDIAGeForce 930MX (Does the graphics card matter?)

Thanks in advance

PS - there didn't seem to be a logical place to put a question like this - but feel free to move or suggest where I should put a question like this in future.

[Dan C]

Hi @S J Damson,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

I'd recommend the following:

• Make sure your GPU drivers are fully up-to-date, directly from the manufacturers (Nvidias) website.
• Make sure that Windows Updates are also fully up-to-date.
• Open the Affinity app, then navigate to Edit > Preferences > Performance and untick Hardware Acceleration at the bottom of this dialog.
  Restart the app as prompted and then try editing once again.

Please do let me know how you get on here

[S J Damson]

Thanks Dan

The extra RAM arrived today and I installed it before reading your post.

I'm going to see how it goes before I untick the Hardware acceleration.  Out of interest what does that do or not do?

However I will check the drivers are up to date first.

I'll let you know how it goes by the end of the week.

 

 

 

[Dan C]

No problem at all, many thanks for letting me know!

3 hours ago, S J Damson said:

Out of interest what does that do or not do?

Hardware Acceleration is covered in further details here - https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Extras/hardwareAcceleration.html?title=Hardware acceleration

Essentially, the application uses your GPU to speed up the rendering of the canvas, however there are issues known to the team when using certain setups which can cause 'hanging' (not-responding applications) intermittently, hence I recommend trying with this option disabled & you should hopefully not lose much performance from this being off.

I hope this clears things up

[S J Damson]

Hi Dan

Made all the changes that you recommended plus some you recommended in another post which was to set performance preferences in the graphics settings.

Its made a huge amount of difference.  

Thanks

I have some other problems but I think I will need to record it - can you recommend the best way or app to use to record the screen.  The issue is to do with recording macros and it would be easier to post a video rather than trying to explain what the problem is.

[GarryP]

The Xbox Game Bar on Windows 10 (maybe 11 also) has a built-in screen recorder but it doesn’t record menus and some other things: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/110424-ive-been-asked-to-provide-a-screen-recording-how-do-i-do-this/

You could try the free OBS Studio https://obsproject.com/ but set-up may be a bit more complicated if you have multiple monitors and/or are using a laptop.

[S J Damson]

Thanks Garry - I forgot about the Xbox Game Bar - from memory the file size turn out huge - but I'll try it and see how it goes.  If it doesn't work I'll check out your suggestion.

 

[RichardMH]

On 7/3/2022 at 9:27 PM, S J Damson said:

Thanks Garry - I forgot about the Xbox Game Bar - from memory the file size turn out huge - but I'll try it and see how it goes.  If it doesn't work I'll check out your suggestion.

 

Easiest way I've found is with Zoom. Have a meeting of one and record the screen.