Affinity Designer 2 is freezing and requiring a system reboot

[Jim Flint]

For the past couple of days, Affinity Designer 2 has frozen ('application is not responding') on MacOS Ventura 13.1 (MacBook Pro with M2 chip). A force quit doesn't solve the problem -- the app freezes during the restart. The only solution is to reboot my machine. I don't recognize anything common about what's happening at the time of the freeze, although it's possible that I was saving or opening files in most cases. This is a completely new issue -- I've been running AD2 on my MacBook Pro since AD2 first became available. Any ideas what's going on?

[Jim Flint]

I may have found what's going on, described in this thread (although my experience has less of a happy ending): 

 

I am indeed saving work to a cloud drive (Zoho WorkDrive). I may have to use a local drive for active work and move files in and out of cloud storage. Not particularly convenient.

[SSFF9]

I have the same problem of Affinity Publisher repeatedly freezing. I am running it on Windows 11 on a desktop computer. I am writing a book - the file is 20 MB. The document is mostly text, but it also includes a lot of small black and white graphics.

Publisher has started freezing in the last two or three days. Previously I could close and re-open the application and it would then work OK, but today it has frozen about three times, and the last two times it froze after I typed about 4 characters. 

UPDATE: I have just seen another user's note saying that Affinity strongly recommend not saving on an external drive. I was indeed saving this file on a "Network-Attached Storage" device (I don't know exactly what that means, but the device is connected by a cable to my computer). I therefore made a copy direct from that location to my PC and then opened that copy, and now Affinity Publisher doesn't freeze immediately.

Also, when Affinity opens, it automatically also opens the file I had open last time it closed, a feature I rather like and that had stopped working. So, two problems solved by saving on my PC instead of on an external disk!

SECOND UPDATE: I spoke too soon - the freezing has returned twice already! The application runs for 15 or 20 minutes before freezing, which is better than freezing after typing four letters, but still bad. I have lost all work I had not saved before it froze.

Edited March 11, 2023 by SSFF9
Freezing has resumed.

[SSFF9]

On 3/10/2023 at 5:14 PM, SSFF9 said:

I have the same problem of Affinity Publisher repeatedly freezing. I am running it on Windows 11 on a desktop computer. I am writing a book - the file is 20 MB. The document is mostly text, but it also includes a lot of small black and white graphics.

Publisher has started freezing in the last two or three days. Previously I could close and re-open the application and it would then work OK, but today it has frozen about three times, and the last two times it froze after I typed about 4 characters. 

UPDATE: I have just seen another user's note saying that Affinity strongly recommend not saving on an external drive. I was indeed saving this file on a "Network-Attached Storage" device (I don't know exactly what that means, but the device is connected by a cable to my computer). I therefore made a copy direct from that location to my PC and then opened that copy, and now Affinity Publisher doesn't freeze immediately.

Also, when Affinity opens, it automatically also opens the file I had open last time it closed, a feature I rather like and that had stopped working. So, two problems solved by saving on my PC instead of on an external disk!

SECOND UPDATE: I spoke too soon - the freezing has returned twice already! The application runs for 15 or 20 minutes before freezing, which is better than freezing after typing four letters, but still bad. I have lost all work I had not saved before it froze.

THIRD UPDATE (4 Aug 2023): I have not had this problem with Affinity Publisher for many weeks now. it doesn't freeze even after several hours, and I can close and re-open documents (provided they are saved on my internal hard drive) without problems. I don't know what solved it but it's a relief.

 

[remark3d]

I have exactly the same problem, after a while of working in Affinity Photo 2 my computer suddenly freezes out of nowhere. It starts by jerking the mouse cursor and it's inevitable. After a few seconds, you can't do anything, it's like RAM is overloaded and you can't even start the manager (shift+alt+del) and you can't hard shut down affinity. Nothing can be done on the PC anymore, only the hard reset button.

I can't figure out why this is happening. The drive was running without a problem, the only difference is that I installed the program on a different SSD (G:) instead of the default C : due to space.

Does anyone have a solution, there is enough space on all disks, I don't see in the settings even the possibility to move cash somewhere, so I assume it still saves everything on C :

Affinity is very backward in this respect compared to other programs, where it is possible to have more options with plugin storage, swap disk etc.

W11, last update

 

[R C-R]

Assuming the OS is working correctly there is no way for Affinity or any other app to lock up the entire computer, requiring a hard reset to recover.

[remark3d]

All programs work correctly, but unfortunately every time I start Affinity, it freezes - my system otherwise works without problems, that is, every time and ONLY when I start Affinity and perform several operations in it. Then the whole PC always freezes, as I have already described.
If this happened other times, I would understand what you are writing, but it is not the case.

[remark3d]

I tried changing the nvidia Studio version driver to the latest Game version. I also tried to completely uninstall and reinstall all Affinity programs (before they were on the SSD marked G:, now I installed them on the default C : SSD. This did not solve the problem. After a short time of work, my computer freezes completely, it's always only when I start Affinity Photo and do some cropping with images and layers in 4K. It's absurd and completely unusable. I loved Affinity's features but from a professional point of view Affinity is frustrating and unstable software. I have been solving the problem since December without success. On the forums I see that many users have similar problems with freezing, all the reactions are that it must be a problem with the user's computer and nobody solves anything. I am frustrated. I'll try completely disabling hardware support in the settings. It always starts with the mouse cursor freezing until you can't do anything on the PC (W11) but restart. This is the only graphics software that does this, there is no problem with Photoshop, Corel Paintshop Pro or other 3D software. All the problems described above always start after Affinity is started. So don't let anyone here tell me it's not an Affinity problem.

[remark3d]

It seems that the problem is really in the poor support of Affinity GPU hardware acceleration. When OpenCL is turned off and GPU render (nvidia card) is switched to WRAP, the freezing stops.

This is absurd, but I don't notice any slowdown of the process calculation. I wonder what actually hardware support for GPU and OpenCL on Affinity is supposed to improve. In my case it always just freezes the computer completely and it doesn't matter which of the latest official nvidia drivers you use.

Does Affinity support solve this?

[carl123]

Hardware acceleration is definitely a problem on some PCs

But you should be able to get the nvidia driver working

Have you tried enabling that but with hardware acceleration off

Note: The studio driver appears to be more reliable than the game driver for affinity apps

[remark3d]

I agree, the studio nvidia driver is the most stable for profi programs. I understand all this. It's that there's some kind of looping bug that completely destroys the whole system in a moment, I haven't encountered that with other programs, only with Affinity. It will destroy all unsaved work not only in Affinity but also in other open programs. From a professional point of view, this is BIG trouble. I don't have time to experiment anymore, I need to finish a project. I'm glad it's working in this state so far without the described problems with the GPU. When I have more prosotru, I will try what you write. If I understand correctly, you suggest to leave nvidia GPU active (from current WRAP) and disable only OpenCL hardaware support? 
By the way, is there a description somewhere on the Affinity site of what these two things do within Affinity, what they REALLY speed up, and why they are better than working without them?

 

Martin

[carl123]

1 minute ago, remark3d said:

If I understand correctly, you suggest to leave nvidia GPU active (from current WRAP) and disable only OpenCL hardaware support? 

Yes (Using the Studio drivers)

 

2 minutes ago, remark3d said:

is there a description somewhere on the Affinity site of what these two things do within Affinity, what they REALLY speed up, and why they are better than working without them?

In simple terms, Warp effectively bypasses your graphics card/chip. Normally your graphic card/chip will be faster than using Warp but depending on your usage of the apps you might not notice any performance degradation at all when using Warp. But ideally you would want to have the graphics card/chip working for those tasks that will greatly benefit from using it

Hardware acceleration is a separate option which can provide an additional performance boost to certain tasks when using the apps. Unfortunately, it has been shown to be unreliable/detrimental on some computer configurations, so switching it off is the only recourse until they make additional changes to it. At which time you could switch it back on again to test it, if you want to.

The Help file will also go into these options in more depth