Affinity Photo performance issues/tips

[DiggerJapan]

Hi

I've just moved from photoshop to Affinity Photo and would like to keep it this way. How ever i am getting some huge performance issues.

I have a brand new Mac Studio with M1 Max & 64GB RAM. I was expecting the app to fly buy it just lags and stutters. So much so im on the verge of signing up for Photoshop again.

If i have a 16bit Tiff file open and i try to crop it, it seriously lags and takes me almost 1min to even position the crop frame. Even on other smaller files i get the spinning beach ball while the software thinks about something. It could be Document resizing, filters etc.

Is there anything i can do to solve this? Or is this a series of bug issues that will be fixed?

[Lee D]

It's worth trying with Metal Compute disabled, open the apps Preferences > Performance and uncheck, restart the app and try your workflow and see how the performance is.

[DiggerJapan]

Hi Lee

I will try that, but wont that also degrade performance?

I have also tried unchecking the adaptive display brightness option as i read that might be causing issues.

[Middel47]

I'd like to let you know that my performance went backwards when I moved from a MacBook Pro 13" with Intel i7 to a 16" M1 Max with 64GB. For what it's worth I have a 4TB version. 

When compositing images in AP, the software became irresponsive while brushing in masks and adjustment layers. At first I thought it were driver bugs from my Wacom or macOS. But finding this thread made me try disabling Metal Compute and this did the job for me. I did edit some images and did not get the irresponsiveness after. When things change I'll get back to this thread. 

I do feel that I might miss out something when the Metal Compute is fixed (but disabled on my Mac.)