Photo and Designer still freezing / 1.10.6

[Guidos]

I've had this freezing problem most of the time Ive been using Affinity Photo & Designer and see other posts about it but haven't yet seen a guide to solving this. Nothing else is having issues on my M1 Mac (32GB RAM) except Affinity Photo & Designer. I'm reluctant to upgrade to V2 as I see the same issues there too.

Any suggestions for fixing Affinity would be grateful. Thanks

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Guidos said:

Any suggestions for fixing Affinity would be grateful.

Depends on several factors which have to be identified first (narrow down) at all here, like ...

• the used macOS version
• on what sort of operations and app state does it overall freeze, like maybe ...
  • on startup during system fonts load
  • some file i/o
  • performing GPU related drawing functions
  • during memory intensive operations
  • ... etc.

... before being able to give some more concrete suggestions.

[Guidos]

Thank you:

• Ventura 13.2
• Not on startup (startup is fast)
• Before any file is loaded it can freeze for 10 seconds or so, and also after loading a project file it'll freeze regularly for around 10 seconds. 
• My projects tend to have a screen shot with text over the top (I'm doing YouTube Thumbnails) but the screen shots are about 10Mb files so in GPU terms I wouldn't imagine this to be an issue. I run Unity and also OBS recording with no frame drops.
• I don't see this as a memory intensive issue as I will use Affinity Photo without Unity or OBS running. I see in Activity Monitor that Affinity Photo CPU usage spikes if I select a layer such as a font or an image and then drops down later on (see attached). 

[Dan C]

Thanks for the further information provided @Guidos, can you please navigate to Affinity Photo > Preferences > Performance and provide a screenshot of your settings here for me?

On 7/17/2023 at 9:20 AM, Guidos said:

I'm reluctant to upgrade to V2 as I see the same issues there too.

Have you tested the V2 trial on your machine, or is this based on similar reports you've seen here for V2?
If you have tried the trial, is this a recent version (ie 2.1 or later) or was this previously tested, when we first announced V2?

Many thanks in advance

[Guidos]

Thanks Dan, apologies for the digression into a comment about v2. It's just that Ive had this issue with V1 for a while and haven't seen any conclusion with updates so wondered if it would continue into V2. Pure speculation only.

Anyway, for now, here is the performance window you requested 

[Dan C]

No problem at all, thanks for confirming that for me and your screenshot provided!

3 hours ago, Guidos said:

It's just that Ive had this issue with V1 for a while and haven't seen any conclusion with updates so wondered if it would continue into V2

There have been many fixes and improvements implemented into V2, which certainly might benefit your workflow - especially for the newer 'M' based devices from Apple.
You can try a free 30 day trial of V2 from the below link, to see how this impacts your machine:

https://store.serif.com/get/universal-licence-2/trial/

Please note that Affinity documents are not backwards compatible from V2 to V1, so please ensure you are working on a copy of any V1 files in V2.

 

In regards to your V1 screenshot, I'd recommend unticking Hardware Acceleration at the bottom of this dialog, then changing the Display from Metal to OpenGL. Now restart the app as prompted and try editing your document once again - hopefully this will reduce the freezing behaviour for you

[v_kyr]

On 7/17/2023 at 6:32 PM, Guidos said:

Before any file is loaded it can freeze for 10 seconds or so, and also after loading a project file it'll freeze regularly for around 10 seconds. 

If it freezes regulary afterwards it could be hardware acceleration related as Dan C already suggested to test out. Or some font caching issues.

On 7/17/2023 at 6:32 PM, Guidos said:

My projects tend to have a screen shot with text over the top (I'm doing YouTube Thumbnails) but the screen shots are about 10Mb files so in GPU terms I wouldn't imagine this to be an issue. I run Unity and also OBS recording with no frame drops.

It always depends on what operations is performed here on/with the text and also how things are internally implemented here then for the used objects memory allocation & deallocation. Meaning it's not everywhere (in all different apps) handled the same way.

[Guidos]

On 7/19/2023 at 1:19 PM, Dan C said:

In regards to your V1 screenshot, I'd recommend unticking Hardware Acceleration at the bottom of this dialog, then changing the Display from Metal to OpenGL. Now restart the app as prompted and try editing your document once again - hopefully this will reduce the freezing behaviour for you

Thanks Dan, I've done a few of my usual tasks and have not yet had the freeze issue. I appreciate your support and realise I shouldn't have been so negative. Thanks v_kyr also.