Photo V2: AMD Radeon hardware acceleration active?

[Dr. Joachim Neudert]

Is hardware acceleration now possible für AMD Radeon cards? When I try to activate it in V1, I get the misleading answer "Windows 10 is necessary", which is obviously running in the newest version. But when digging in the forum I see Affinity doesn't support OpenGL on Radeons above the 5000 series.

Hardware acceleration would be an important feature , I would buy the new Version 2 if it is supported now. I have it now on the Mac Studio (with Apple GPU Chips, on a AMD R295 GPU in my Intel iMac it didn't work as well) and would love to get it in Windows as well.

Is it supported now?

 

Best regards

 

Joachim Neudert

[Komatös]

Hi @Dr. Joachim Neudert

In principle, hardware acceleration works with Radeon 5xxx/6xxx cards in V2. However, it cannot be ruled out that hardware acceleration does not work with some combinations of CPU and graphics cards.

[Dan C]

Hi Dr. Joachim Neudert,

You should be fine with an AMD card with DX12 compatibility. Mac's aren't such an issue with AMD due to the alternative Metal Acceleration option.

Which Card are you using?

Lee

[Dr. Joachim Neudert]

Hello Lee,

it is an AMD Radeon RX 5700XT. Soon to be replaced by an AMD Radeon 7900 XTX.
Direct X12 should be working. As far as I understand, Serif claims a problem with AMDs OpenCL implementaion.

If I try to activate "hardware acceleration" OpenCL on my Windows 10 PC (AMD Ryzen 5950 16-Core CPU with 64 GB RAM), Affinity Photo V1 tells me (in German) that it needs Windows 10 from Mai 2020 or newer. Which I run, naturally.

So now it runs only as a rasterizer on my Radeon Card. Not so bad, but the Benchmrks on my Mac Studio Ultra with hardware acceleration are way faster.

It`s a minor problem, of course.

Greetings from Bavaria

Joachim

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Dr. Joachim Neudert said:

If I try to activate "hardware acceleration" OpenCL on my Windows 10 PC (AMD Ryzen 5950 16-Core CPU with 64 GB RAM), Affinity Photo V1 tells me (in German) that it needs Windows 10 from Mai 2020 or newer. Which I run, naturally.

In V1, the message tells you that you need both of theses:

• The right Windows release
• An appropriate GPU

As you have the right Windows release, then (for V1) the message means that you do not have an appropriate GPU. There were major performance issues with more recent AMD GPUs and their OpenCL support when Affinity 1.9 and 1.10 were being developed. Serif reported them to AMD, and disabled OpenCL in 1.10 to avoid the AMD performance issues. There was much discussion in the forums about that.

Since then, we know that

• AMD has released some new drivers for those GPUs; and
• Serif has allowed OpenCL to be used on those GPUs in V2.

There have been no updates to V1 since 1.10.5, and we do not know what (if any) updates to V1 are planned in the future. But since there have been none, OpenCL is still disabled for those GPUs in V1.

We also do not know if those GPUs are, in fact, performing well in V2, or whether AMD still has performance problems.