Affinity Designer triggering system wide UI flickering and stuttering

[WillowOne]

 I love the Affinity Designer, but lately, it has become unusable. 

 System Specs:

•  Affinity Designer: 1.10.5.1342
•  Windows 11 Pro 21H2 OS Build 22000.978  
•  AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor 3.70 GHz  
•  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090  
•  RTX 3090 windows driver 31.0.15.1694  
•  GeForce Game ready driver 526.94

Description
Some months ago, I noticed that whenever I used Affinity Designer, it was only a matter of time before my machine became unstable. The Instability was accompanied by menus immediately closing when opened, stuttering mouse movement and UI flickering. Furthermore, once this behaviour started, it would seemingly affect the whole system, even after getting Affinity Designer to close. My system would no longer maintain focus in input boxes in any application, and the UI flickering would start to affect the windows notification area and other UI elements. This behaviour would only occur after using Affinity Designer, and once it had started, only a complete system restart would resolve it.  

I stopped using Affinity Designer as it wasn't stable enough for me to work with, hoping a future update might resolve it. I have since had updates to affinity and my graphics drivers, but the problem persists.  

[Lee_T]

Hi WillowOne,

Could you try and disable Hardware Acceleration in Edit > Preferences > Performance and see if that improves matters? 

Lee

[WillowOne]

This did not resolve the issue.

After disabling Hardware Acceleration I restarted Affinity and then loaded a file. After a few moments the application once again became unstable forcing a restart. 

[WillowOne]

Is there anywhere else I can/should raise this as a support issue?

[carl123]

13 minutes ago, WillowOne said:

Is there anywhere else I can/should raise this as a support issue?

No, this is all there is.

In Edit > Preferences > Performance switch the Render to Warp

Close Designer and Reboot PC (so it's a totally clean start) and try again

Let's see if we can narrow down where the problem is

[WillowOne]

This did not resolve the problem.

I opened Edit > Preferences > Performance and switch the Render to Warp. Affinity requested to be restarted; which I did. I then shut it down and restarted my computer. Upon loading a file it was initially stuttering but appeared stable. I then loaded another file and after a few moments the flickering behaviour once again  began and my system became unstable; forcing yet another restart.

[Lee_T]

1 hour ago, WillowOne said:

Is there anywhere else I can/should raise this as a support issue?

You already have.

When you say "your system became unstable". Do you mean your entire system or just Affinity Designer?

Lee

[carl123]

You can also check this list of known software that interferes with the Affinty apps to see if you have any of them installed

 

[WillowOne]

As I said in my original post:
 

Quote

Furthermore, once this behaviour started, it would seemingly affect the whole system, even after getting Affinity Designer to close. My system would no longer maintain focus in input boxes in any application, and the UI flickering would start to affect the windows notification area and other UI elements. This behaviour would only occur after using Affinity Designer, and once it had started, only a complete system restart would resolve it.  

To be clear this ONLY ever occurs when using Affinity Designer. I use a wide variety of other software and never see this issue.

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