Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?

[TheFlow]

Hi guys, I noticed a huge difference in loading times of the programs at startup comparing my home and work PCs. 1.9 and also the new 2.0.

At work I had an Intel i7 7700K and now an i7 12700K, both super fast startup and snappy in AP and AD.

At home, my PC is comparable in all aspects except the CPU, it's a Ryzen 1700X which should perform comparable. But all Affinity Apps load a LOT slower. We're talking 2-3 seconds on the Intel systems and almost 40 seconds on AMD. All systems have Samsung Pro SSDs on M2 and all more than 16gb Ram. All those PCs have NVidia GTX 1070s and the new one has an RTX 3070 Ti.

Can anyone comment on this, is it the CPU?
Hardware Acceleration doesn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks!

[Ericcc]

Intel i5 here, Affinity v2 is about half as slow as Affinity v1 (loading, user interface, RAW processing).

Not sure why.

Turning OpenCL hardware acceleration on/off has no noticeable effect.

[2ChainShane]

Hi Gents,
so I have a Ryzen 7 5750G and 32Gb Ram. My start up is fine and no noticeable slowness on start up but great-Scott is it painful to work. I have a severe lag from input to a reflection mostly from cycling throw tools with my keyboard shortcuts around 2 seconds.  NO clue as to the reason. I have played with some settings in terms of performance but also no change. 

[TheFlow]

I made sure I updated all my drivers, my system (Win10) runs smooth as ever.

Then I opened AP2 again and waited for the UI to load (little over 30 seconds), then tracked the time it took from pressing Ctrl+N until the Window for a new document appears. 19 seconds. That is insane.

Painting is smooth but the UI is so slow I can't work like this.

I wonder if this is some runtime problem from AMDs and if the devs know anything more about it.
 

[thomasp]

Affinity 1.10.5 here. Takes a hair over three seconds to load on Windows 10 (Ryzen 5950) as well as Mac (Xeon 6-core Trashcan) for me.

Haven't done any benchmarks for direct comparison but both are working well for painting et al (hardware acceleration activated in both cases).

CTRL+N instantly pops up the new document template selector.

[TheFlow]

Thank you Thomas. It's odd, I can't figure anything out. I hope someone knows what is causing this issue. I investigate further, maybe I'll find a hint.

[thomasp]

Perhaps it's the builtin virus scanner in Windows?

I had to disable that thing - incredibly intrusive and frequently scanned applications on startup, absolute torture when you frequently have to launch image viewers etc. MAde my Ryzen system feel slower than some 10-year old Intel running on SATA-SSDs.

You can temporarily disable it from the settings GUI somewhere to test if it's that. It'll turn itself back on after a bit though - back to sluggish-mode. Requires more intrusive measures to get rid of entirely.

[TheFlow]

Thank you, yeah I tried all of this. Also updated my BIOS and all drivers, shutdown all background apps I found. Nothing works. I pinged the devs and hope some day soon someone will see my message and have any kind of information what could cause the sluggishness.

[hein]

i have Ryzen 7 3700 , 16 Gb Ram , m2 Samsung 970 EVO Plus , RTX 3050 startup Affinity Photo a little more than 1 second

[RPC]

1700X  is not a great AMD cpu to compared to the 7700k and especially not to the 12700K.

The 1700x has poor single thread performance especially if it's not paired with ideal ram, which could severely impact single thread bottle necked tasks like opening large software.

 

Given how old the 1700x is there's also a good chance your hard drives are bottled necked by your motherboard too if you're using M2 drives, which would effect load time quite a lot.

eg: All M2 drives are not equal even if they are the same, M2 Sata is vastly slower than M2 NVMe, and M2 NVMe gen 1 is vastly slower than NVMe Gen 3..etc but just like video cards you can plug newer M2 drives into older slots and they work, but you get reduced speeds bottled necked by the old slot standard.

 

[rvst]

This is not an easy thing to diagnose as many components, both software and hardware, could be the cause of the slowdown. Others have mentioned some. The launch times you quote are extreme and likely due to some software issue with your computer (rather than an AMD processor).

You can use the Windows Performance Monitor to gather statistics about what's happening during application startup to help diagnose the cause. 

Output for mine is below, with data capture paused just as Photo finishes displaying the user interface. It would probably be interesting for you to compare to yours given that your startup is so slow by comparison. 

My Photo v2 starts up in 4 seconds. I have an AMD 5950x with 128GB of RAM and a Samsung 980 pro, so similar setup to yours except the processor is faster and the RAM way more.

A couple of things to note in this output. The number of page faults per second is very high. During its startup, Affinity Photo generated several times the amount of page faults per second that Microsoft Word does during startup and a considerably larger number than Affinity 1. This is likely because Affinity Photo loads a lot of dynamic link libraries during program startup - 216 in all, including the Windows system DLLs it requires. 

With this number of page faults per second, if your disk is slow (or you don't have a big enough pagefile) you will assuredly experience slow launch times.

Ditto if your RAM is constrained either by its physical size or used up by other applications. Note the working set size: if you don't have at least this much physical RAM free (~500MB) then a lot of swapping will occur. This will also increase startup times as disk accesses, even SSD accesses, are vastly slower than RAM accesses. And if you have an on-access virus scanner, then each disk access will be slowed down. The cumulative effect can become quite significant. 

Also check your pagefile size is appropriate (the output below shows Affinity Photo uses around 650MB of pagefile during startup)

Other less likely potential causes you may want to investigate:

• Affinity products phone home during startup, at the very least checking for updates. If one of your configured DNS servers is not responding to a query, timing out and causing a fallback to the next configured server, this could add a lot of time onto your startup, as each dns query will take a second or two to timeout before it retries or falls back to the next configured server.
• Disk failure - block read errors. Get Crystal Disk Info and check the SMART status of your SSD (or Samsung Magician, although later versions of Magician don't work with a 980 Pro)

Oh, and check the Windows Event Log. There might be some clues there in warning or error conditions that could point you in the right direction. 

 

[RPC]

If you're after page fault and the like details you are usually always better off with:

Process Explorer:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

 

Right click a column header > Select columns [only context menu option if you clicked in the right place]
Process Memory tab > Page Fault check box.

Than you can see the page fault for all active processes

[rvst]

39 minutes ago, RPC said:

If you're after page fault and the like details you are usually always better off with:

Process Explorer:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

 

Right click a column header > Select columns [only context menu option if you clicked in the right place]
Process Memory tab > Page Fault check box.

Than you can see the page fault for all active processes

Yeah, process explorer is quite useful for this too. Good suggestion. The added benefit is that it shows total number of page faults as opposed to a page fault / second.

[TheFlow]

Hi guys, really appreciate how much you're trying to help.

- I made a lot of space and have now 30gb free on my SSD, before it was only about 10. Also, increased the Pagefile to 12GB instead of automatic setting just to be sure. No or maybe just a very slight difference.
- 408509 Page Faults until loaded up and ready to go, tested multiple times.
- Crystal Disk, as well as Samsung Magician tell me the SSD is alright.
- Cut the internet off (disabled the driver) for a test, no effect.
- Trying to reinstall all dependencies like Microsoft .Net 4 etc, we'll see if that helps anyway.


 

[RPC]

There's a good chance it's just your CPU/Motherboard.

My spare parts living room computer is a Intel Core i5-4670K which has pretty much the same single thread performance as the 1700x and uses a samsung 970 pro on an M2 slot that doesn't properly support it's speed and I went ahead and put AD 2.0 on it and it takes 37 seconds from icon click to blank load.

 

 

[TheFlow]

Jep, that might be it. Since everything else works well here - I sculpt and 3D model for work and my system still handles ZBrush, 3D Coat and Blender pretty damn well considered how "old" it is. I'll see into benchmarks and will probably build a new system in the coming months. Thanks @RPC for taking the time to even try it on a second system!

[RPC]

Really a lot of old computers do really good, it's mainly that AMD was lagging behind on the single thread for a long time. Which is one of the reasons why Zen 2+ which is what everyone else on this forum post has was such a big deal it really brought the fight back to intel.  Since it's like your workstation, the 7700k is older than your 1700x but in a lot of real world settings the 7700k is just faster/better. I have a 7700k as pen display art computer literally sitting next to me. Than my old workstation was a Ryzen 5 3600 for virtually all real world things the 7700k was faster than the 3600.

Intel 7700k [2016] raw 9667  single 2729

AMD 3600 [2019] raw 17805 Single 2569

 

the 3600 could only best the 7700k in: AAA gaming, 3D software rendering, Code compiling times, and software video encoding.

Note only software rendering and encoding, since anything that used the video card the 7700k did just as good as the 3600 because they both had a 1080ti.

Because I was super disappointed in the 3600 I moved up to the 5600x [Raw 21955 Single 3354] since it was an easy drop-in CPU replacement, and now my workstation/gaming system is noticeably faster than my art computer 7700k.

I've also had a lot of other intel and AMD systems over the years, I built computers for friends and family, and usually kept them for a week or two to use as my main work computer to test stability. So I've gotten hands on experience with almost every generation of Intel and AMD cpu since the Intel  Q9550 and the AMD Phenom 9550

Which despite having nearly the same model number and coming out at the same year the Q9550 from intel wipped the floor by miles with the Phenom 9550... The early Phenom days was also a bleak time in AMD history.

 

 

 

[debraspicher]

11 hours ago, TheFlow said:

Jep, that might be it. Since everything else works well here - I sculpt and 3D model for work and my system still handles ZBrush, 3D Coat and Blender pretty damn well considered how "old" it is. I'll see into benchmarks and will probably build a new system in the coming months. Thanks @RPC for taking the time to even try it on a second system!

Honestly, AM4 is cheap rn (at least here it is) for a remove & replace CPU if you were looking to upgrade. It'll make your other workflows faster as well.

[Frozen Death Knight]

Affinity on my Ryzen 9 5950x loads in about 3-4 seconds (for Photoshop around 7-8 seconds). Can't complain.

[RPC]

The in slot CPU upgrade is certainly an option, if supported by your motherboard. I'd highly recommend jumping to the 5600 since you do 3D work, but not the 5600x as it cost more and it's only a slight difference in overall power also don't get the 5600G it's an APU which you don't need in your setup since they sacrifice CPU power for integrated graphics [IGP] and you'd be better off saving even more money and going for the Ryzen 5 5500 [currently under $100] since it's about on par to the 5600G but without the integrated graphics. Which for the value the 5500 is the cheap and powerful upgrade as long as your motherboard supports it.

Given the potential age of the motherboard I'd probably recommend avoiding the Ryzen 7 5800 or above as they bump up the TDP [power consumption] and even if the board can support it in the bios it has a high chance of leading to system unsuitability.

Which brings up the fact that not all AM4 boards can do in place generation updates, especially that many generations. You'd want to look up the motherboard model number and make sure there's been a bios update that supports the newer CPU before buying one. Also make sure to flash the newer bios before updating the CPU otherwise you may wind up having to put the old CPU back in, in order to update the bios for the system to work with the new generation CPU.

 

[TheFlow]

1 hour ago, RPC said:

Which for the value the 5500 is the cheap and powerful upgrade as long as your motherboard supports it.

Thank you, I'm really thinking about it now. Got an MSI B350 Mate Motherboard, it supports the CPU. I will need a better GPU anyhow and also more Ram, so I'm considering building an entirely new system, maybe around christmas time.

[RPC]

1 hour ago, TheFlow said:

Thank you, I'm really thinking about it now. Got an MSI B350 Mate Motherboard, it supports the CPU. I will need a better GPU anyhow and also more Ram, so I'm considering building an entirely new system, maybe around christmas time.

Looks like the MSI B350 has gotten a lot of nice support so it would be a great candidate for a drop in upgrade.
 

If you do multitasking you'd probably notice a good boost moving up to 32+GB of ram. With as bloated as programs and windows are nowadays. It's pretty easy to go over 16GB of RAM. Just looking at taskmanger now I only have an email client, a web browser with 1 tab open, a music player, steam,and a handful of background tools [AHK, Telegram, windowmanger..etc] and my system has 8GB of 64GB of ram committed and in use.

I'm looking forward to a new video card upgrade too, though I'll wait until a couple months into the new year. Now that the markets stabilized I expect a pretty good price drop once the "new" rush ends.

[debraspicher]

2 hours ago, TheFlow said:

Thank you, I'm really thinking about it now. Got an MSI B350 Mate Motherboard, it supports the CPU. I will need a better GPU anyhow and also more Ram, so I'm considering building an entirely new system, maybe around christmas time.

It's a great time to rebuild. I just upgraded my system (I have a good board) and my hub's system as well. Rebuilt our living room rig. Have parts to build maybe another (linux machine maybe). Good times.

Edit: The only thing I will suggest is don't skimp on CPU. Affinity makes use of those extra cores, even though it's very easy to focus on single-core performance.

[debraspicher]

21 minutes ago, RPC said:

Looks like the MSI B350 has gotten a lot of nice support so it would be a great candidate for a drop in upgrade.
 

If you do multitasking you'd probably notice a good boost moving up to 32+GB of ram. With as bloated as programs and windows are nowadays. It's pretty easy to go over 16GB of RAM. Just looking at taskmanger now I only have an email client, a web browser with 1 tab open, a music player, steam,and a handful of background tools [AHK, Telegram, windowmanger..etc] and my system has 8GB of 64GB of ram committed and in use.

I'm looking forward to a new video card upgrade too, though I'll wait until a couple months into the new year. Now that the markets stabilized I expect a pretty good price drop once the "new" rush ends.

I hit 50% RAM @ 32GB pretty easily doing basic workflow. RAW editing will chew that up.

[TheFlow]

Yeah, at work I now got a brand new 64GB Ram machine with i7 12700K and an RTX 3070Ti. I'll read reviews and benchmarks of the new Ryzen CPUs and compare to Intels counterparts. The only programs I've run into in the last years that were "specifically CPU problematic" seem to be the Affinity Suite.