Performance Settings - 2017 MacBook Pro - This Helped!

[Ldina]

I found some settings that have improved performance on my MacBook Pro, so I thought I'd share them in case it may be of help to someone else. I know computer configurations vary a lot, but it may be worth a try. This is with Affinity Photo v2.2.1.

I have a 15 inch, 2017 MacBookPro, 16GB RAM, an Intel HD Graphics 630 with 1536 MB Metal 3, and an AMD Radeon Pro 560 with 4GB Metal 3, running Ventura 13.6.1. It is not a particularly fast or powerful machine, but it worked fine for quite a while. I'm not sure when I started having problems (sorry), but I think it may have started with v2.2. Performance has gradually gotten slower as the day progresses. Memory Pressure started out very low when the program first opened (single digits), but as I edited and closed more files during the day, Memory Pressure crept higher and performance began to suffer badly. Memory Pressure gradually climbed higher than 100% at times, and Memory Efficiency plummeted at the same time. Performance got so bad, I was forced to close the program and restart it multiple times per day if I wanted reasonable performance. At least on my computer, I found the setting that "seemed" to be causing much or all of the slowdown. 

The key on my system is to "Use Only Integrated GPU" for Display", as highlighted in Red in the attached screenshot. I'm still Enabling Metal Compute Acceleration, which uses both GPUs for computation. My RAM Usage Limit is set to 9500 MB, which is more than half of installed RAM of 16 GB, and higher than I've seen recommended in a few posts, but it seems to be working fine and performance is good now. As the day progresses, I no longer see slowdowns which cause me to restart Affinity Photo, and Memory Pressure stays well below 100%. 

Hope it helps somebody out there who has similar performance issues.