Does Affinity Designer benefit from a Resizable Base Address Register?

[DC9V]

With Resizable BAR, the CPU can efficiently access the frame buffer. If multiple requests are made, transfers can occur concurrently, rather than queuing. Does this affect Affinity Designer's performance in any way?

[Dan C]

Hi @DC9V,

Apologies for the delayed response here! I can confirm that currently Affinity does not take advantage of resizable BAR, though I will be sure to suggest this with our development team

[DC9V]

Hi @Dan C, No need to apologize! 

When using Affinity Designer, I think I've encountered a performance drop (before the upgrade) when reBAR was enabled, especially when creating vector-based arrows. However, I could simply turn reBAR off in the BIOS whenever I have the impression that it's causing issues. When playing demanding video games at 4K, it increases the frame rate by just a few FPS, if at all. I actually doubt that Affinity Designer or any other app would drastically benefit from it.

What seems more important to me would be the implementation of a fixed physics tick rate, a proper way of consistent frame pacing, and decoupling the physics from vertical sync by capping the app's frame rate at a multiple of the physics tick rate, e.g. 240 or 288 FPS. There could be a toggle in the settings to choose between 120FPS (60 or 120Hz), and 288 FPS (144Hz). 

 

TL;DR, reBAR is rather unimportant. Please take a look at input variance and frame pacing. Consider disabling V-syng, by manually capping the frame rate instead. Also please check compatibility with input devices that provide a polling rate of 1000Hz or more. 

 

Cheers

 

[Dan C]

I certainly understand, and as a user of a high refresh rate monitor myself I do agree that we could do better in this regard - I'll be sure to pass your feedback through to our team here!