Affinity v2.04: Zoom 200 and 300 works improperly

[Wolfn]

Bug or feature?

When I zoom to 150 or 200, I get a black sliding cover below the circle. I does not happen with 400, 800 or below 150.

Has anyone an idea?

 

Wolfgang

[GarryP]

Zooming to 150% or 200% works okay for me.
Can you explain what you mean by “black sliding cover below the circle”?
I can see some things in your photos that I wouldn’t expect to see in normal application use but I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be looking at.
Also, is there a repeatable workflow which we can use to replicate the problem for ourselves?

Note: Screenshots are best taken by using the operating system functionality (e.g. Snip & Sketch – Win+Shift+S – in Windows) rather than via camera. That way we can see what is on the screen rather than what the camera can see and screenshots are much clearer than photos. There is plenty of information about getting screenshots on the web.

[Wolfn]

Sorry, but I can't do a screen shot. As soon as I leave the working window in Affinity Photo, the affect disappears. And that is also the case if I use Win + shift + S!

A add again 3 photos taken by my cell phone. The 1. is when  I use the mouse as pointing device (and everything is fine). As soon as I move into the picture and the pointer changes to the circle this cover appears. I marked the sliding black cover with some errors. This black cover follows the pencil up and down.

I find the affect annoying and I can not move freely over the picture.

[Pšenda]

Try set HW Acceleration to off (in application Preferences).

[Wolfn]

HW Acceleration set to off did not fix it.

[debraspicher]

Do you have Gsync or Freesync (AMD) on? NVidia drivers did similar to my display when I had it on for windowed mode.

[Wolfn]

Here is what I have:

Computer               Acer Spin SP513-54N
Systemtyp              64-Bit-Betriebssystem, x64-basierter Prozessor
Prozessor               Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz   1.50 GHz
Installierter RAM    16,0 GB (15,8 GB verwendbar)
Intel(R) Iris(R) Plus Graphics  (integrated monitor)

Edition    Windows 11 Pro
Version    22H2

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information, and explaining why you can’t take screenshots to show the problem.
I notice from the photos, something which couldn’t be seen from normal screenshots, that your laptop uses Wacom Feel technology (logo at bottom-left of photos).
I’m wondering if that is somehow ‘interfering’ with the Affinity applications in some way.
Is there a way to, temporarily, switch it off?

[Wolfn]

I couldn't find  driver to switch off. It reminded me,  that I still had the XP-PEN drivers installed. (For the tests, I switched off the tablet and restarted Affinity photo). I de-installed the application, but the problem persisted.

Today I learned something new to the phenomenon: There is a threshold depending on the zoom when it starts.

Below you see the zoom and the threshold of the width of the pencil when it happens:

zoom 400 --> width 30 is OK, 31 shows the error
zoom 300 --> width 41 is OK, 42 shows the error
zoom 200 --> width 62 is OK, 63 shows the error

I used the softener tool, the selection tool showed with zoom 400 the same error

 

[GarryP]

I’ve never seen this happen before, and I don’t have much experience with digital pens, so I don’t think I can help much further.

For instance, I don’t have a clue what “threshold of the width of the pencil” means.

Someone else should have some idea though so hopefully they will see this and be able to assist.

[Lee D]

Not something I can recall seeing, if you are using a pen tablet, try disconnecting and just using a mouse to see if it still occurs. It's looks like an overlay of some kind to display something, check Windows Task Manager and see what else is running. Do you have any accessibilities setup in Windows?

[Wolfn]

That is what I tried to explain above. I did disconect the tablet, and took off the USB-Stick for the wireless connection. It made no difference. Finally I de-installed all tablet drivers  (I use a XP pen DECO 3 and know it is not recommended) and worked a few days only with the mouse. (Of course I rebooted).  Nothing changed. Meanwhile I re-installed and do a work around: either by reducing the zoom factor or by reducing the brush or pen (or whatever tool) size.

Tomorrow, I will check Windows Task Manager. Unless you ask me, I will not de-install the tablet drivers, but of course I will not use the tablet. I have to disable Windows Defender.

I do not understand the meaning of 'accessibilities setup in Windows'.

[debraspicher]

This is last ditch, but what is your display scaling/DPI setting? If it is not 100%, try with that and see if that alters the behavior.

That is technically an accessibility setting btw.

I have had issues with zoom behavior within the program rendering with DPI scales above 150% in the recent build. Over the years also have seen strange UI behavior with high DPI (scaling) and multimonitor scenarios. Not this severe but it has made dogfood out of itself display-wise.

[Wolfn]

I changed the following setting without success.

Scaling (for text and Apps .. ) from 200% to 100%
Display resolution  from  2256 x 1504   to  1920 x 1440

The error still occurs.

[Wolfn]

Regarding to Lee D's suggestions:

I tried by: Switching of my WiFi, and stopping everything I intentionally started, running only Affinity and whatever was scheduled by Windows. Still I see the error. The CPU load is 3% as shown in image No_4.jpg.

Today I learned something new. Beyond a certain big zoom factor the error vanished.

The error depends on the size (or width, I have a German setting) and the zoom factor. And it happens in a certain range. I  add two short videos (No_2.mp4 and No_3.mp4) where you can watch me changing the zoom factor. The size (or width) is different in the two videos. (I used the mouse, but the keyboard does the same).

I tried under settings -> performance  to increase max RAM and I disabled HW acceleration (OpenCL acceleration). It doesn't solve my problem.

[debraspicher]

Have you tested an external display by chance? (Sorry if I missed that) Can always try it on a TV with a extra HDMI. I would use Win key + P to show only on external display temporarily to negate any weirdness.

The only other thing I can think of is your laptops display refresh is set to something not being supported by the UI but the trigger being zoom doesn't make any sense. I am sorry you are having this problem at all.

[Wolfn]

You solved the problem.

An external screen did show the same error pattern.

But by changing the refresh frequency to 48Hz for the laptop screen, I couldn't reproduce the error.

Weird is, that changing back to 60Hz and rebooting still showed no error.

Thank you very much for your support.

Regards

Wolfgang

 

[debraspicher]

1 hour ago, Wolfn said:

You solved the problem.

An external screen did show the same error pattern.

But by changing the refresh frequency to 48Hz for the laptop screen, I couldn't reproduce the error.

Weird is, that changing back to 60Hz and rebooting still showed no error.

Thank you very much for your support.

Regards

Wolfgang

 

Very bizarre. Hopefully it doesn't happen again. Take care