V2 Consistently crashes when dragging/copying a large 32-bit image

[Greg Zaal]

I'm using Affinity Photo to edit HDRIs, which are typically high resolution, high bit-depth images. Version 1 of Affinity never had issues with this, but in V2 I am completely unable to drag one image onto another one if they are both high res & high bit depth. Affinity will always crash without fail. Here's a screen recording:

https://u.polyhaven.org/G3u/2024-01-09_15-36-43.mp4

Same story if I open the two images separately and try to copy-paste the one to the other - as soon as I press Ctrl-C, Affinity will crash.

This is the case for any image that is sufficiently large. Sometimes I can work around the issue by copying a small section at a time, but in many cases I need to work on the whole image at once and I have to borrow a collegue's computer which is still running V1.

I have 96GB of ram and 8GB of VRAM (this was always sufficient in V1).

Attached are my crash reports.

I can supply example files to test with if needed.

CrashReports.zip

[James Ritson]

Hi @Greg Zaal, is there any chance that in V1 you had disabled OpenCL acceleration via Edit>Preferences>Performance? V2 will have this enabled by default, and although OpenCL support has improved greatly since V1 (particularly with out of memory situations), your workflow may be exposing a shortcoming there, especially as Photo will be using your device's Intel HD integrated graphics: Intel HD devices and drivers have always proven problematic with the way OpenCL is used in Photo (fairly "aggressively", as almost all raster operations in the app are accelerated).

Are you on a desktop or laptop machine? On desktop, you could disable the Intel HD graphics via Device Manager (or through the BIOS)—this would enable you to continue using the 4070 for OpenCL, which may be fine (or not—see below). On a laptop, however, you would have to disable OpenCL entirely to stop the integrated graphics being used.

With OpenCL active, performance and responsiveness is very much dependent on the amount of available VRAM, so even though you have 96GB of RAM, you will be constrained by 8GB on the 4070. Disabling OpenCL and using software (CPU) rendering will remove that bottleneck, the downside being that CPU-based compositing is less performant. However, if you are primarily retouching HDRIs rather than stacking multiple live filters, this may be less of an issue anyway. Based on the bit depth and dimensions of what I can see in your screen recording, just one of those documents would require at least 3.5-4GB VRAM, without accounting for overheads. Trying to copy-paste or place another document with similar requirements will likely saturate the VRAM of your GPU entirely. This shouldn't ordinarily be an issue—as mentioned above, out of memory situations were handled poorly in V1 but improved for V2—but perhaps that is what is happening here.

Hopefully the above is relevant to the issues you're having, as they can then be easily mitigated. If not, a member of tech support or QA should be able to read the crash dumps and see what's actually happening.

[Greg Zaal]

Thanks for the info James. Unfortunately disabling OpenCL acceleration does not help, Affinity still crashes.

I also tested it on another machine that has 12GB of VRAM, and it also crashes (report attached) regardless of whether OpenCL is enabled or not. Unfortunately at the moment I don't have another machine to test with that has more VRAM.

CrashReports.zip

[Greg Zaal]

Here are some files I'm testing with (I seems any 24K 32-bit pair has the same issues): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mwpTwh_VzbCqeuMo8iRQxiwrC6AXMN0a?usp=sharing

[James Ritson]

Hey again @Greg Zaal, thanks for the files. I've been able to reproduce the 'place' crash on both macOS and Windows—interestingly, this happens on macOS V1 as well for me (1.10.8), but Windows V1 appears to be fine.

Opening two EXR documents side by side, then copy-pasting the RGB pixel layer from one to the other is fine on both platforms here though, I'm struggling to reproduce that (both V2 and V1). Is that consistently reproducible for you? (Perhaps with OpenCL disabled as well?)

We'll get the place crash logged and see if anyone else internally can reproduce the copy-paste crash.

[Greg Zaal]

Hey James, glad you can reproduce it

I tested on my 12GB VRAM machine and am able to copy-paste just fine, even if OpenCL is enabled. On my 8GB machine, it crashes either way.

[Chris B]

I get the crash doing File > Place with only 4GB VRAM

[James Ritson]

4 hours ago, Greg Zaal said:

Hey James, glad you can reproduce it

I tested on my 12GB VRAM machine and am able to copy-paste just fine, even if OpenCL is enabled. On my 8GB machine, it crashes either way.

Hey @Greg Zaal, how different is the hardware between the two machines? Are you running identical versions of Photo? You can check by going to Help>About and looking at the specific version number.

The EXR drag-drop/place crashing has been fixed—not sure when that will make it in, but we are currently running a 2.4 beta cycle. If it goes in, I'll let you know!

Also, could I get you to check something based on some testing: if you go to Edit>Settings and choose the Performance category, what is your RAM usage limit set to? If you set it to a sensible value, such as half your installed RAM (e.g. 4096MB for 8GB), do you still experience crashing when opening multiple EXRs and copy-pasting between them?

[Greg Zaal]

Both machines were running Photo 2.3.1.

The first is a laptop with an i9-13900HX, 96GB ram, and an RTX 4070 (8GB VRAM).
The other machine is a desktop with an i7-8700k, 64GB ram, and an RTX 4070 ti (12GB VRAM).

Glad to hear it I'd be happy to test the beta when it's in there. 

The laptop's memory limit is set to the maximum 65536 MB. I also tested previously with half of that, both times would crash.