Affinity Photo (v2.1 and v2.2) Pan not smooth

[Ἀριστοτέλης]

Hey there, when panning using Photo for some reason the image does not pan smoothly as expected instead it jumps as if the software or the machine could not handle the image size type of thing. The file loaded is 1mb 1000x1000px 72 dpi RGB

With Affinity Designer panning a document is perfectly smooth regardless of its complexity. When using Publisher, also the panning is not happening smoothly as with Designer.

My machine is a macbook pro M1 max, 10 cores,  64gb memory, running monterey 12.2.1.

I have reviewed all the preferences in photo and publisher and modifying them does not seem to help.

Could you please advise if this is a bug or expected or if there is a fix or work around?

Thanks team

[DWright]

Hi @8BIB8,

Welcome to the forum

Can you please try turning off the Metal acceleration in the Affinity Photo Settings and let me know if this improves the panning speed and can you also check that Photo is not using the Rosetta emulator.

[Ἀριστοτέλης]

Hi @DWright

Thanks for your help. I managed to fix it following this process:

I turned off the Metal acceleration (I tried this before with no luck) and this time did not help either.

I ensured the app wasn't run through Rosetta by:

• checked Info Panel ('Open using Rosetta' is off)
• checked Activity Monitor (value in 'Kind/Architecture' column is Apple not Intel)
• I then run the app from the terminal: arch -arm64 /Applications/Affinity\ Photo\ 2.app/Contents//MacOS/Affinity\ Photo\ 2\ Affinity\ Store

The issue with panning persisted.

I went back to settings and changed the other setting (attached picture) 'Performance | Display' from Metal to OpenGL

That fixed the issue! Thanks so much for pointing me in the right direction.

I have a few questions out of curiosity if you have a moment to advise.

My understanding was that Metal is designed to take full advantage of my machine including the GPUs as this would provide better performance than OpenGL, especially with my Apple Silicon (M1) giving Metal is a more modern graphics API that offers better support for multithreading and improved efficiency compared to OpenGL. Also that Apple is actively maintaining and updating Metal as it is considerered the future of graphics on Apple platforms.

1. shouldn't my machine giving its specs use metal instead of openGL to get improve performance when using Affinity Photo with complex files?
2. does this mean that Photo is not developed to work with Metal or you are currently working on this?
3. is the 'OpenGL' selection a temporary solution looking at switching back to Metal with a new release? (I have jumped on Affinity straight on 2.1 from Photoshop so have not much experience with it so far and need to plan ahead depending on the complexity of jobs coming. I'm sure I can rely on Photo, just need to double check and would appreciate your insights)

 

Lastly, I did the same change in the settings of Publisher and the issue with the pan tool is also fixed. Great.

However, I noticed that with a new document, creating a text box and trying to move the box around (with snap being turned on or off) the text box seems to be jumping unable to follow the cursor. I'm not sure if this is related to the change in preferences and perhaps has an easy solution. The version running is 2.2.0 (latest just upgraded) settings are unchanged and it's the very first document I created.

Any guidance to fix this one would be appreciated. I attached a video demonstrating the issue.

Thanks again, I look forward to your update.

[DWright]

Can you please try changing the ambient light sensor settings in the Apple System settings to manual as we have encountered where the automatic setting can effect the screen polling rate.

[Ἀριστοτέλης]

Thanks @DWright, the 'Automatic adjust brightness' option was off and kept it like this, and I turned off 'True Tone'

I restarted Published, however the issue continues.