Affinity Photo Clogging all the available Memory in RAM on Apple M1 Mac Mini?

[augustya]

I wonder if any of the M1 Mac Mini users have encountered this issue while using the Affinity Photo Software on their M1 Mac Mini.

So I personally do not still own a M1 Mac Mini but I am just about to buy one in some days and hence it maters me ever than before.

So there was this one user on one of the Mac Mini User Forums that I came across who said that while using Affinity Photo on the M1 Mac Mini the Affinity Photo software is some crazy RAM Hogger, he said that when he imported some RAW images from his Sony Camera for Editing in Affinity Photo his RAM usage kept climbing between 8GB to 16GB but when he loaded 10 to 40 RAW images that really clogged the entire Memory Pool on his M1 Mac Mini making it extremely slow.

He went on to say that, for every 20-25MB Sony or Canon RAW file imported, Affinity Photo memory use jumps 1.5-2.0 GigaBytes ! Even for a 10MB JPEG imported, Affinity Photo memory use jumps almost 400MB. This is simply importing, no editing yet, no layers, etc.

I would be really worried with these data if this keeps on happening and there is no changes made to how Affinity Photo Software manages the Memory Pool on the M1 Mac Mini as using AF Photo I do not want to JAM or Clog my other Tasks that are currently operating on the M1 Mac Mini.

Has the Affinity Photo Software Developer team taken note of this ? Are they aware about this issue ? is anything being done in this direction ? For an effective usage of RAM by Affinity Photo on the M1 Mac Mini Machines ?

Later the user updated that he could only free all the RAM that Affinity Had Occupied in his 8GB M1 Mac Mini when after going into Affinity Photo and in the Application he chose the Affinity Raw engine to “Apple Core Image RAW” instead of the default “Serif Labs”

Can the Affinity Photo Developer Team shed some light on this issue, and if this indeed is the problem with the Apple M1 MAC Minis ?

Here is the link to that Post if anyone is interested

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/which-mac-mini-recommended-for-my-kind-of-usage.2367935/page-3?post=31706947#post-31706947

[James Ritson]

Hi @augustya, I have previously used an M1 Mac Mini with 16GB memory.

Affinity Photo was never really designed for loading many RAW files simultaneously—it's not a batch RAW editor so will treat each RAW image loaded in as a separate document with its own memory footprint, rather than trying to be conservational with memory. RAW files are composited in 32-bit floating point precision, which also requires more memory than 8-bit or 16-bit.

When used appropriately, Photo's memory management on M1 devices is honestly fine. macOS is very good at managing swap memory, and uses swap quite aggressively compared to Windows anyway. I rarely had instances when editing photographic images where things would slow down because of memory issues. Creating huge live stacks full of 16-bit images and working with 32-bit multi-layer renders would occasionally eat into swap memory, causing some hitching here and there, but for general image editing you really shouldn't be worried about it.

You will find people making spurious claims that 16GB on Apple Silicon is 'like' 32GB on other devices (similarly, how 8GB is 'like' 16GB)—I believe this may be as a result of experiencing M1/M2's very fast storage architecture, so loading in and out of swap is much faster than older hardware generations. This means that out of memory situations are not as debilitating for productivity as they may have previously been.

What else would you be trying to do simultaneously that may require large pools of memory? If you're trying to multi-task with memory hungry applications, you may be better off looking at something with more memory, e.g. the Mac Studio with 32 or 64GB. I would be saying this regardless of what software you were trying to use, it's more about the workflow and what you expect to be doing.

Hope that helps!

[maxegb]

i can confirm james's post. 

i switched to Affinity exactly because i got an m1 mini as soon as those were out and Serif was ready for it. I personally don't find any kind of hiccup working with up to 4 or 5 simultaneously open raws winth multiple layers, adjustments etc. But you have to keep in mind that loading a raw in afinity is not like loading it in lightroom, it is more like using photoshop.

Aphoto is capable of developing a raw file, but it is no batch raw processor like lightroom or capture one or rawtherapee. If i have to process a batch of raw files my workflow is to get the basic parameters right using rawtherapee or iridient (fuji user here), and then pass them through affinity as an alternative to Pshop.

If i do a single image (or a bunch of them one by one) i go straight to afPhoto.

[augustya]

46 minutes ago, James Ritson said:

Hi @augustya, I have previously used an M1 Mac Mini with 16GB memory.

Affinity Photo was never really designed for loading many RAW files simultaneously—it's not a batch RAW editor so will treat each RAW image loaded in as a separate document with its own memory footprint, rather than trying to be conservational with memory. RAW files are composited in 32-bit floating point precision, which also requires more memory than 8-bit or 16-bit.

When used appropriately, Photo's memory management on M1 devices is honestly fine. macOS is very good at managing swap memory, and uses swap quite aggressively compared to Windows anyway. I rarely had instances when editing photographic images where things would slow down because of memory issues. Creating huge live stacks full of 16-bit images and working with 32-bit multi-layer renders would occasionally eat into swap memory, causing some hitching here and there, but for general image editing you really shouldn't be worried about it.

You will find people making spurious claims that 16GB on Apple Silicon is 'like' 32GB on other devices (similarly, how 8GB is 'like' 16GB)—I believe this may be as a result of experiencing M1/M2's very fast storage architecture, so loading in and out of swap is much faster than older hardware generations. This means that out of memory situations are not as debilitating for productivity as they may have previously been.

What else would you be trying to do simultaneously that may require large pools of memory? If you're trying to multi-task with memory hungry applications, you may be better off looking at something with more memory, e.g. the Mac Studio with 32 or 64GB. I would be saying this regardless of what software you were trying to use, it's more about the workflow and what you expect to be doing.

Hope that helps!

Hi James,

Seen a lot of your YouTube videos, like your way of explaining things 

So can I ask you this question which I asked on the Mac Mini Forum.

Would you say to use Affinity Photo on the M1 Mac Mini even 8GB of RAM should be good enough ? or should I go with the Mandatory 16 GB of RAM ?

[James Ritson]

6 hours ago, augustya said:

Hi James,

Seen a lot of your YouTube videos, like your way of explaining things 

So can I ask you this question which I asked on the Mac Mini Forum.

Would you say to use Affinity Photo on the M1 Mac Mini even 8GB of RAM should be good enough ? or should I go with the Mandatory 16 GB of RAM ?

Hey again,

I would definitely go for 16GB. You might easily outgrow 8GB, which is entirely possible with larger resolution documents that have multiple layers. You should also consider that Apple Silicon uses a shared memory architecture, so both your CPU and GPU will be using that memory pool. Back when I had the Mac Mini, it seemed that macOS would impose a restriction on the amount of memory the GPU could allocate (roughly half of the available 16GB)—having since moved to an M1 Max with 64GB, I managed to get Photo to use around 45GB (which is certainly over half), so I couldn't comment definitively on how that works, especially since they were on different OS revisions (Big Sur and Monterey).

Bit of a long-winded way of saying always go for the maximum you can afford! With any kind of image editing workflow and any software, you may find you can easily max out 8GB nowadays. The super fast swap helps, certainly, but it's no substitute for actually having that extra memory headroom.

[augustya]

7 hours ago, James Ritson said:

Hey again,

I would definitely go for 16GB. You might easily outgrow 8GB, which is entirely possible with larger resolution documents that have multiple layers. You should also consider that Apple Silicon uses a shared memory architecture, so both your CPU and GPU will be using that memory pool. Back when I had the Mac Mini, it seemed that macOS would impose a restriction on the amount of memory the GPU could allocate (roughly half of the available 16GB)—having since moved to an M1 Max with 64GB, I managed to get Photo to use around 45GB (which is certainly over half), so I couldn't comment definitively on how that works, especially since they were on different OS revisions (Big Sur and Monterey).

Bit of a long-winded way of saying always go for the maximum you can afford! With any kind of image editing workflow and any software, you may find you can easily max out 8GB nowadays. The super fast swap helps, certainly, but it's no substitute for actually having that extra memory headroom.

Thanks for the explanation.

[JPBERUTTI910]

On 11/7/2022 at 5:24 PM, James Ritson said:

Hey again,

I would definitely go for 16GB. You might easily outgrow 8GB, which is entirely possible with larger resolution documents that have multiple layers. You should also consider that Apple Silicon uses a shared memory architecture, so both your CPU and GPU will be using that memory pool. Back when I had the Mac Mini, it seemed that macOS would impose a restriction on the amount of memory the GPU could allocate (roughly half of the available 16GB)—having since moved to an M1 Max with 64GB, I managed to get Photo to use around 45GB (which is certainly over half), so I couldn't comment definitively on how that works, especially since they were on different OS revisions (Big Sur and Monterey).

Bit of a long-winded way of saying always go for the maximum you can afford! With any kind of image editing workflow and any software, you may find you can easily max out 8GB nowadays. The super fast swap helps, certainly, but it's no substitute for actually having that extra memory headroom.

Hi! so, is this the reason why after working 1 or 2 hours in affinity desinger the software starts running slow and i can barely select any shapes? I have 8gb of ram, and i work with social media pieces, so nothing crazy, but somethimes i work with a lot of artboards .
Affinity runs like butter when i launch it, but after some work i notice that it starts to slow down at the point i need to restart it.

I was wondering if upgrading to 16gb would fix this problem.