Editing and creating styles very slow and buggy

[postmadesign]

In the latest version, working with styles in Designer is still very buggy and slow. Adding and removing styles is very slow, and might even crash the app. Each time I have an object selected to create a style from, opening the styles menu to add a style takes several seconds with spinning beach ball. This behaviour was already problematic in v1, but I hoped the new version, plus a new Mac Mini M2 would resolve this. It is still there though, and it is very annoying!

I hope that you can finally improve on the styles functionality, both improve speed and reduce bugginess, but also allow for better editing of a style. Why not give me the option to edit the style and change things like effects, line width or color? It is quite cumbersome to work with right now, which is a real shame...

[MikeTO]

Do you have "Automatically Adjust Brightness" selected in System Settings > Displays? If so, try turning it off.

I have no issues like you're experiencing on an M1 Pro but I've had that setting off ever since it became an issue with Affinity.

[postmadesign]

No I do not have this setting turned on. However I have had this problem with my old intel iMac in V1 too, so I don't think this causes it.

[MikeTO]

The other thing you can try is to go to Affinity Designer > Settings > Performance and turn Hardware Acceleration > Enable Metal Compute Acceleration off and also change Display from Metal to OpenGL. I've turned Metal off permanently on my computer at Serif's recommendation due to repeatable crashes.

Good luck

[postmadesign]

On 6/27/2023 at 9:00 PM, MikeTO said:

The other thing you can try is to go to Affinity Designer > Settings > Performance and turn Hardware Acceleration > Enable Metal Compute Acceleration off and also change Display from Metal to OpenGL. I've turned Metal off permanently on my computer at Serif's recommendation due to repeatable crashes.

Good luck

Really? I  find it hard to believe this would change my issue, because I have been using a non metal Mac until very recently (v1 in this case) and it had the very same issue.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, postmadesign said:

Really? I  find it hard to believe this would change my issue, because I have been using a non metal Mac until very recently (v1 in this case) and it had the very same issue.

Similar crashes can occur for different reasons. There are known issues with Affinity and Metal and turning off Metal is usually the recommendation. If you're able to parse a crash report you might able to see if the cause is Metal. I had endless crashes due to Metal, things as simple as zooming in would crash. It's a bit slower with Metal off but modern Mac hardware is so fast that it's fine.