Open CL Graphics Card

[storrya]

Are there any benefits to buying an Opne CL type graphics card. I currently don’t have one. I Just have a basic nvidia card.

[walt.farrell]

It should help performance. But it may not. 

It may, instead, cause problems.

What were you thinking of getting?

[storrya]

not thinking of getting anything at the moment. More interested in finding out if the Open CL improves performance and taking it from there….

[Dan C]

1 hour ago, storrya said:

More interested in finding out if the Open CL improves performance and taking it from there

Hardware acceleration and direct 'performance gains' are hard to quantify exactly, as this will highly depend on your type of workflow within Affinity, as well as other considerations such as your CPU, RAM (speed and amount) and storage type.

For example, you may not see large amount of direct performance improvement simply by purchasing a GPU that supports Hardware Acceleration if your computer is already bottlenecked  by your CPU core speed, or amount of RAM available to the Affinity app.

However if your current setup already has a relatively fast CPU with many cores available and ample RAM (I tend to recommend 16GB plus for any new system nowadays, even when removing Affinity from the equation, due to the amount used by the OS and other apps when multi-tasking) then a GPU that is a few generations old could provide a speed boost to Affinitys canvas rendering, with Hardware Acceleration.

I'd recommend checking out the below post with some older Benchmark scores from within Affinity, paying attention to the second image that covers Windows and the Raster GPU scores - 

Although run for a previous version of the app (and therefore we don't usually recommend direct comparison of these scores between newer app versions), you can run the benchmark on your system (Help > Benchmark) and use the score provided as a rough baseline for the potential performance improvements in Affinity with H.A. enabled from the above scores from other users systems.

I hope this helps

[storrya]

Excellent Dan - Cheers !