Poor Performance on Windows Machine

[Andy_Nic]

Hiya hoping someone can help me with this;

 

I've been experiencing quite a bit of lag/slowdowns whilst performing quite simple actions.

Just moving nodes and creating curves is very juttery and slow.

I have a 10900k processor, 3080ti graphics and 32GB of ddr5 ram.

I'm not sure that performance should be this bad, are there any options I can adjust to make things a bit smoother?

I've tried toggling off hardware acceleration but that just made it worse.

 

Thanks, Andrew

[Andy_Nic]

After a bit more investigation, I believe it's mainly after using the corner tool on a point, does this normally slow things down this much?

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @Andy_Nic

Can you give us an example document and a video showing how your machine performs when editing that document?
If we have both we will have something to compare with when testing it for ourselves.
Without that information we have no way of knowing what the difference is between what we expect and what you get.

[Andy_Nic]

Hiya, here is an example of what I mean, feels very juttery.

This is very early on in the picture too, it gets progressivly worse the more points I edit, once to the point of crashing.

tree2.afdesign

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information.

I’ve just tried to do what you are doing on my much-less-powerful machine and I get pretty much the same result as yourself.
I think the ‘lag’ is, as you suggested earlier, because of the addition of a corner to (pretty-much) every node on the curve.
I don’t think there’s much we can do about this unfortunately, other than ‘baking’ the corners but that’s not an ideal situation here.

Hopefully someone else will come along with better advice.

P.S. You could try a different Renderer (Preferences/Performance), if you have a choice, but I don’t hold up much hope for much of a perceptible increase in performance.

[Andy_Nic]

Thanks Garry, I'm new to Affinity and vectors in general, so my work flow might not be ideal and not totally sure how certain actions will affect performance.

I guess in the future I will try to leave corner tool till later on.

Thanks

[GarryP]

You could try adding a corner to only the node you are working on and then, when that’s looking good, Bake it (via the Corner Tool Context Toolbar) and move on the next one, and the next, etc. Long-winded perhaps, but it should give much faster rendering.

[Andy_Nic]

Yeah I'll have a play with it, maybe I can get away with doing them in bigger batches than one. Do a number of them, bake them, move on. I'm guessing baking them sorta locks the corners removing any calculations they might be involved in.

 

[walt.farrell]

I'll start by saying I'm not an expert at vectors and Bezier curves. But I wonder why you're using Sharp nodes, and applying the Corner Tool to them to round them, rather than using Smooth nodes or Smart nodes?

[Andy_Nic]

Mainly it's a combination of not knowing any better and ease of use, I found it easier to use the pen tool to quickly lay out the end points for curves and then move the cures after the fact. I've only just started learning the different tools, node types etc. So thanks for the tips I'll have a look into Smooth and Smart nodes and see what they're about.

[Dan C]

Hi @Andy_Nic,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

Thanks for providing a copy of your document! I've checked with our team here and I can confirm this is expected behaviour when the Corner Tool has been used this many times on one curve, as the app is constantly 'calculating' these corners - which doesn't happen once you use the 'Bake Appearance' option on the Context Toolbar with the Corner Tool & Curve selected.

However, we're always looking to improve the Affinity apps and there's certainly room for refinement here, so I will be logging this file with our developers to see if we can better handle these situations in a future version.

I hope this helps!

[R C-R]

For what very little it is worth, on my Mac (specs below in my sig) there is no detectable delay or lag when I change the radius (or corner type) of any of the nodes, so apparently this is a Windows-only issue?

[Dan C]

Thanks R C-R, although not perfect I do see improved performance with this file on my Mac, compared to my Windows PC - so I'm going to log this file for further investigation, as I would expect them to perform similarly

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, Dan C said:

Thanks R C-R, although not perfect I do see improved performance with this file on my Mac...

FWIW, on my Mac I consider it to be perfect because there is zero discernible lag when using the Corner Tool, even on curves as complex as in the tree2 example file.

Which Mac (& macOS version) are you running? How does its hardware compare to mine?

[Dan C]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, on my Mac I consider it to be perfect because there is zero discernible lag when using the Corner Tool, even on curves as complex as in the tree2 example file.

How does you mac behave when using the Node tool to adjust the curve itself, rather than the Corner Tool? I can see that the Corner Tool works instantly for me on macOS, but trying to transform the curve itself using the Node Tool has a second or two of delay (as well as a slight rendering issue, which I've logged with the devs separately).

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

Which Mac (& macOS version) are you running? How does its hardware compare to mine?

Monterey (12.5.1), 27" iMac (2019), 6-core i5, 16GB DDR4, Radeon Pro 580X is the device I tested on
I suspect the newer, 8-core i7 and possibly having twice the amount of RAM would contribute most towards improved performance in this file 

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, Dan C said:

How does you mac behave when using the Node tool to adjust the curve itself, rather than the Corner Tool?

Maybe not instantaneously but if there is a delay it is very short, one or two tenths of a second at most, even when I select dozens of nodes & drag them all to new positions.

[Pšenda]

On 8/29/2022 at 3:27 PM, walt.farrell said:

I'll start by saying I'm not an expert at vectors and Bezier curves. But I wonder why you're using Sharp nodes, and applying the Corner Tool to them to round them, rather than using Smooth nodes or Smart nodes?

...mainly, it works completely unpredictably this way - just move a node, and both adjacent parts of the curve will change significantly.

[Dan C]

I'll be sure to include your specs and behaviour in the dev report, thanks R C-R

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Maybe not instantaneously but if there is a delay it is very short, one or two tenths of a second at most, even when I select dozens of nodes & drag them all to new positions.

 

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

I'll be sure to include your specs and behaviour in the dev report, thanks R C-R

My experience is the same as R C-R. If I select all the nodes in the tree file the 'delay' is a fraction of a second. This is on the Mac Pro.

[Medical Officer Bones]

This file is... weird. I converted the tree curve with "convert to curves" and still got incredible lag. Then I decided to export to a SVG for testing in other apps and found no issues in InkScape, PhotoLine, Illustrator, or Blender.

Just in case I re-imported the SVG version to ensure the curve would be an actual baked curve. At which point I discovered really odd behaviour: editing a few points on the left side of the tree, and it behaves smooth like butter. But the more I run along the curve clockwise, the worse the lag becomes! The zoom factor affects this as well.

And it affects EVERTHING: even the screen updating. It takes an instant for the nodes to appear when panning the view - but only on the right-bottom side of the tree. Drawing a selection marquee slows down dramatically. On the far left, no issues at all.

Here is a comparison between editing a few points on the LEFT side and on the right-bottom side:

This counts like a bug in my book.

My system: Windows 10, AMD 3900X, 64GB, 3080TI.

[R C-R]

32 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

I converted the tree curve with "convert to curves" and still got incredible lag.

Isn't the tree curve already a curve?

[Pšenda]

3 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Here is a comparison between editing a few points on the LEFT side and on the right-bottom side:

On which side is the begin of the curve? How does it work after Reverse Curve?

[Medical Officer Bones]

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

Isn't the tree curve already a curve?

Because the original had all those rounded corners applied with the corner tool, I just wanted to ensure Affinity is working with a pure curve and nothing else. The reasoning: when I zoomed in to edit the curve (on the right side) Designer still lagged terribly.

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

On which side is the begin of the curve? How does it work after Reverse Curve?

Reversing the curve doesn't matter: the right side of the drawing responds very poorly when zoomed in on a section. The left side does not. The left side of the trunk also performs badly. I found the start and end points, and it doesn't matter.

The odd thing is that when I zoom out to 100% or less, the lag disappears. The more I zoom in, the worse the lag becomes.

[Pšenda]

12 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Reversing the curve doesn't matter

Thanks for the info - I was wondering about that given the fact that the curve is always recalculated when using corners. If the calculation started from the beginning of the curve, and changing the curve interrupted the calculation and started again from the beginning, then the changes near the beginning of the curve would be rendered faster than at the end.

[Dan C]

Many thanks for the additional info all - I can confirm I happened to be zoomed into the document and editing the right hand side of the curve in my testing, so this could certainly explain the difference in performance I was seeing, compared to others.

I agree there is certainly an issue with the way Affinity is handling this file, and therefore it is logged with our developers - I will be further updating the log now with the above info