Charly Martin Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 Affinity Designer 2.3 Mac: Overall Application Sluggishness + Bugs Hello, I engage in UI design using Affinity Designer version 2.3, and I've been experiencing extensive performance issues throughout the entire application. Not only does duplicating a layer take over a minute, but the overall responsiveness of the app is notably slow. It's worth noting that my computer has robust specifications, and all other aspects of my Mac operate smoothly without any slowdowns. My mac : - Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon W 18 cores - Graphics: Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB - Memory: 64 GB 2666 MHz DDR4 - Hard Drive: Macintosh HD - MacOS: 14.2.1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hangman Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 Hi @Charly Martin, Do you currently have Hardware Acceleration 'on' or 'off' in the Performance Settings? If 'on' and you switch it 'off' and then reboot Affinity Designer, do you see any change in performance? Quote Affinity Designer 2.4.2 | Affinity Photo 2.4.2 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 Affinity Designer Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Photo Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Publisher Beta 2.5.0 (2437) Affinity Designer 1.7.3 | Affinity Photo 1.7.3 | Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 MacBook Pro 16GB, macOS Monterey 12.7.4, Magic Mouse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 Hardware acceleration is enabled, but when I disable it and restart, nothing happens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hangman Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 2 minutes ago, Charly Martin said: Hardware acceleration is enabled, but when I disable it and restart, nothing happens. Nothing happens as in, you see the same performance hit when when duplicating a layer in the same file where it was previously taking over a minute or nothing happens in some other way? Quote Affinity Designer 2.4.2 | Affinity Photo 2.4.2 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 Affinity Designer Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Photo Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Publisher Beta 2.5.0 (2437) Affinity Designer 1.7.3 | Affinity Photo 1.7.3 | Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 MacBook Pro 16GB, macOS Monterey 12.7.4, Magic Mouse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 @Bourreau Nothing happens in the sense that the app remains just as slow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hangman Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 2 minutes ago, Charly Martin said: Nothing happens in the sense that the app remains just as slow. Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying... Are you seeing the sluggishness with both simple and complex Designer files? What dimensions and resolution are the files where you're seeing this behaviour? Are you able to upload a sample file that demonstrates the sluggish behaviour? Quote Affinity Designer 2.4.2 | Affinity Photo 2.4.2 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 Affinity Designer Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Photo Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Publisher Beta 2.5.0 (2437) Affinity Designer 1.7.3 | Affinity Photo 1.7.3 | Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 MacBook Pro 16GB, macOS Monterey 12.7.4, Magic Mouse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 @Hangman, All my files are slow; the entire app is really buggy and sluggish! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hangman Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 @Charly Martin, Again, thanks for clarifying... I suspect when this thread gets picked up by the moderation team at Serif they will ask if you could provide the system specs for your Mac so it may be worth updating the thread to include these... I'm running Designer 2.3.0 on a 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor with 16Gb RAM and I'm not seeing any obvious sluggishness or performance issues which suggests there must be something else going on... I'm assuming the files you're working on are located on your internal HD rather than in the cloud? Quote Affinity Designer 2.4.2 | Affinity Photo 2.4.2 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 Affinity Designer Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Photo Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Publisher Beta 2.5.0 (2437) Affinity Designer 1.7.3 | Affinity Photo 1.7.3 | Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 MacBook Pro 16GB, macOS Monterey 12.7.4, Magic Mouse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 2 Author Share Posted January 2 @HangmanHere I specified Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hangman Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 @Charly Martin, Perfect, thank you... Someone from the Serif moderation team should pick this up and will hopefully be able to provide some alternative things to try... Quote Affinity Designer 2.4.2 | Affinity Photo 2.4.2 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 Affinity Designer Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Photo Beta 2.5.0 (2437) | Affinity Publisher Beta 2.5.0 (2437) Affinity Designer 1.7.3 | Affinity Photo 1.7.3 | Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 MacBook Pro 16GB, macOS Monterey 12.7.4, Magic Mouse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff NathanC Posted January 3 Staff Share Posted January 3 Hi @Charly Martin, We'll need a little more info to potentially assess what's going on, so I have included some additional requests below: - Has this performance problem only started recently? If this is the case, do you recall and major changes on your system around the time it started happening (E.G OS update)? - Could you provide a screenshot of your in app performance settings (Settings > Performance)? - Could you provide a screen recording demonstrating the app's unresponsiveness? If you could also have the Activity Monitor app open at the same time so we can see the app usages that would be helpful. Screen recording on Mac is pretty straightforward, I've linked the guide here if you're unsure: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102618 If the problem has only started happening more recently, it may be worth rebooting and limiting the number of background apps you have running to just Designer. Many thanks Charly Martin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 4 Author Share Posted January 4 @NathanC Hello, The performance issue occurred at the end of last week. I was using version 2.2 of Affinity Designer. The day before yesterday, I updated my system to Sonoma, and Designer upgraded to version 2.3. However, the performance issues persisted. Attached is an image and a video regarding this matter. Enregistrement de l’écran 2024-01-04 à 10.31.04.mov Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff NathanC Posted January 4 Staff Share Posted January 4 Thanks for following up, from your recording there does appear to be some rather severe performance problems in-app. First thing I'd suggest changing is to put the 'Display' renderer to 'Metal' in your performance settings and then restarting to check if that's had any significant impact. The file you're actively working on in the recording appears to be quite large and complex, in addition to two other files open in the app simultaneously. Can you confirm if you close all these documents, restart the app and then create a completely empty artboard document that these same duplication and transformation speed issues persist on an empty doc? If they do, can you open Activity Monitor on the CPU tab (and check memory) in a separate visible window and provide a recording of that for comparison? Having the Activity monitor open will help determine if there is a problem is hardware usage related. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 5 Author Share Posted January 5 @NathanC _.Thank you, I have done what you asked, and indeed, when I create a new file, there is no issue. However, previously, I had larger files than the one that is not working now, and they worked correctly. Here is a message of what the application displays when I enter this file. Afterward, the activity monitor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff NathanC Posted January 5 Staff Share Posted January 5 Thanks for following up, could you possibly provide me with a copy of the .afdesign file from your recording so I can see if the performance problem can be replicated on my side and identify any potential contributing factors? I have provided a private upload link below, and the document will only be used for the purposes of testing this. https://www.dropbox.com/request/naqeRxwQVxCu44TM5jVI Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 5 Author Share Posted January 5 @NathanCThere, it's done. Thank you very much for the help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff NathanC Posted January 5 Staff Share Posted January 5 Thanks, the performance problems are related to the sheer scale of your document, and stem from the artboards I've highlighted below. These artboards contain many thousands of ellipses embedded into groups upon groups across your large artboards which has a huge impact on the app's performance, likely relating to the number of calculations taking place. You may therefore want to consider splitting your document down into fewer artboards (Specifically these ones) Or rasterising the parent group which contains the ellipses on each of the artboards. I found after rasterising the parent ellipse groups that the app performance returned to an expected level, but evidently the vector properties of the objects were lost. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charly Martin Posted January 5 Author Share Posted January 5 @NathanC, thank you very much, I will do that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnd.lettering Posted January 29 Share Posted January 29 I have several bugs in Affinity Designer as well (Windows, version 2.3.1.2217). It makes it quite hard to work with. And since I like to get some things done, I can't be spending time going back and forth about the problems I have... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff NathanC Posted January 29 Staff Share Posted January 29 Welcome to the forums @bnd.lettering, As the issue outlined in this thread was in relation to a file specific problem and on MacOS i'd recommend creating your own separate forum post over on the Windows Bug section giving as much detail as possible on your issue(s) and provide any relevant screenshots and sample files, we'll then be able to investigate further. 🙂 https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/128-v2-bugs-found-on-windows/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnd.lettering Posted January 29 Share Posted January 29 Hi @NathanC Like I said, I have no time to invest in the 'problem solving' that obviously still needs to be done. I can't spend time on helping you solve bugs, because I need to invest that time in designs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
njyo Posted January 29 Share Posted January 29 (edited) Hi, I'm honestly disappointed with the latest version. Every couple of times a year I need to update certain sports uniform designs and the latest version just dies when I try to do anything (add another vector, save the file, etc.) with my 12MB vector design file. It's unworkable. Affinity Desigenr used to be great with large files but over time it's become really unreliable. And it's not like my files are more crazy than the the files shown in the ad videos. And my machine is a M1 MacBook Pro. 😡 Similar to OP, I don't have time to troubleshoot (what was supposed to be a 15min job, took hours until 4am and still no success), but expect AD to just work. Happy to share my file though, if that helps y'all to figure out why it's all crashing. Edited January 29 by njyo Added clarification Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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