Afiinity Photo — layer thumbnails render after long delay, not at all or only after additional action in the app.

[bbrother]

App: Affinity Photo version 2.3.1
OS: Windows 10 Pro (22H2 compilation 19045.3930)
Hardware acceleration: OFF

The Problem (bug):
Layer thumbnails in the Layer panel render after delay, not at all or until an additional action in the app performed by the user.
Additional action to force the thumbnail render or update could be an selection deselect or turning off/on layer visibility.
Or maybe it's coincidence because of the delay. Same thing for pixel layers or mask layers.

Thumbnails of layers in the Layers panel are an important visual reference when working with this tool and should be rendered, reflecting changes on the canvas almost immediately in milliseconds, not seconds otherwise the smoothness of the work is disrupted. 

Video that shows the problem.

 

[Dan C]

Hi @bbrother,

Thanks for your report!

As I understand it, the speed at which your layer thumbnails update will be system dependant and may vary based on your GPU/CPU rendering speed & available RAM (memory).

I've tested the workflow shown in your recording on my Windows 10 PC here, with Hardware Acceleration disabled in Affinity and these layer thumbnails are updated within 1-2 seconds for each action:

The PC I'm using is as follows:

• Intel i9-11900K
• 32GB DDR4 @ 2933MHz
• Nvidia RTX 3060Ti

Can you please confirm your PC specs for me?

When this occurs on your machine, try zooming on the canvas - does this force the Layer thumbnails to refresh for you please?

Many thanks in advance!

[bbrother]

3 hours ago, Dan C said:

The PC I'm using is as follows:

• Intel i9-11900K
• 32GB DDR4 @ 2933MHz
• Nvidia RTX 3060Ti

Don't you think that with such a configuration, the time to create/update layer thumbnails should be almost instantaneous (milliseconds not seconds). 

 

3 hours ago, Dan C said:

Can you please confirm your PC specs for me?

i5 4590 / 16GB DDR3 1600MHz / SSD hard drive. I know it's an old set but so far it does the job and is reliable.

 

3 hours ago, Dan C said:

When this occurs on your machine, try zooming on the canvas - does this force the Layer thumbnails to refresh for you please?

Sometimes zooming in forces the thumbnail to be redrawn immediately.
But sometimes, despite zooming in, I still have to wait for a reaction from the thumbnail in the Layers Panel.

 

 @Dan C Before you laugh and point out my outdated setup:

In my opinion, this is a problem on the application side (how it handles the thumbnail creation/refresh proces), not resources (RAM / CPU).
Dan it can't be that with a processor like I9 it takes the application seconds to create or refresh the thumbnail preview.
Even with my old (4 core 16GB) setup it shouldn't take so long to create/refresh the thumbnail preview in Layers panel.
Not to mention that in no way should it depend on an additional action like zoom in/out, deselecting the selection or turning on/of layer visibility.

 

Edit: By the way, the cat in the photo is beautiful.

[bbrother]

@Dan CI looked into the problem more, did some more test and here are my conclusions.

20 hours ago, Dan C said:

the speed at which your layer thumbnails update will be system dependant and may vary based on your GPU/CPU rendering speed & available RAM (memory)

If this is true, can you explain why while there is a problem with layer thumbnail refresh latency, there is no increase in CPU and RAM usage.
More strangely, the CPU and RAM load remains low when this problem occurs and there are still free resources that the application could use to speed up this process and yet it does not. (See attached video at the end of post)
 

Summary of my observations based on more tests:

• When you copy/paste a selected portion of an image/pixel layer, the layer thumbnail does not update. Zooming on the canvas does'nt force the refresh.
• If I use (CTRL+D), which removes the "marching ants," the thumbnail of the pasted content layer is rendered.
• If I change the size of the layer thumbnail in the Layers panel options, it forces the thumbnail to render, 
• Without active selection on canvas when i use paste command the thumbnail is rendered and updates properly.

 

Conclusions based on observations (Possible problems and why it should be loged to devs or as bug):

• The app incorrectly manages/allocates CPU and RAM resources. Delay when rendering / updating thumbnails while there are still free CPU and RAM resources to use.
• Active selection on the canvas somehow prevents the layer thumbnail rendering.

(Attached video: app and resources usage side by side)

PS: With a processor like the i9_11900_K, the app should create or refresh a dozen thumbnails in the Layers panel in the blink of an eye rather than in seconds. Hardly, it should still brew coffee in the meantime for the user if the processor with an unlocked multiplier is overclocked.

 

 

 

 

[Dan C]

Thanks for the further information and testing conducted!

1 hour ago, bbrother said:

• If I use (CTRL+D), which removes the "marching ants," the thumbnail of the pasted content layer is rendered.
• Without active selection on canvas when i use paste command the thumbnail is rendered and updates properly.

I've investigated this further and I'm seeing similar issues on my PC at home, which has arguably better specs than my PC in the office - 

AMD R7 3700X
32GB DDR4 @ 3200MHz
RTX 3080Ti

Interestingly, OpenCL Hardware Acceleration doesn't seem to affect this, but after creating a selection and leaving the 'marching ants' on screen, the layer thumbnail took over 60 seconds during my recording to update.

As soon as the marching ants were deselected, the layer thumbnail was immediately drawn.

Our team already are investigating how often the 'marching ants' updates on Windows, and it appears as though this is now affecting layer thumbnails - therefore I'm logging a new issue with our devs now and 'linking' these together internally, as I believe this is all related and the delay shown certainly is longer than I'd expect.

I hope this helps

[bbrother]

Thank you very much @Dan C.

I would like to draw your attention to one more thing namely, while searching the forum for whether this problem has already been reported, I discovered that it has. Below is a link to a post that describes a similar if not identical problem with layer thumbnails refresh and to which the author seems to have received no moderator response.

 

[Dan C]

No problem at all!

Thanks for raising this - I suspect this was due to the user posting in the 'Pre-V2 Archive' section of the forums, which isn't as closely monitored by our team.
Though I'll be sure to forward this to my manager to try and reduce the chance of this occurring in the future

[death by pixel]

I have the same problem in AP 2.4.1, and it is very annoying.

It's definitely not a PC performance issue, as the CPU/GPU are idle, while the thumbnails take forever to update.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
RAM: 128 GB
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3070

I have the impression that the delay is reduced when I switch the Renderer from "Nvidia RTX 3070" to "WARP". But it still takes several seconds, which is not normal. Even 20 years ago on much older hardware and the same type of image, Photoshop was updating the thumbnails within a second.

 

Edited April 6 by death by pixel

[Dan C]

Sorry to hear this @death by pixel!

Do you have an active pixel selection (marching ants) in your document when you find these thumbnails are slow to update?

Can you please provide a screenshot of your settings under Edit > Settings > Performance?

Many thanks in advance

[death by pixel]

Dear @Dan C,

I can confirm your observation that having an active selection (marching ants) is delaying the layer thumbnail update substatially. The thumbnails do update within a second after deselection.

My example settings are attached (I'm on Win11). However, the problem persists with all possible options of "Renderer" and "Hardware Acceleration".

Additional observation:

With Hardware Acceleration OFF, having an active selection (marching ants) is using significant amount of CPU power: 20-30% distributed evenly across the 32 logical cores of my CPU (each core is loaded to 20-30%). This is just to draw the marching ants, which again seems pretty excessive, and might indicate a problem.

With Hardware Acceleration ON, and marching ants the CPU is at 2% and GPU at 7%, but the thumbnails still don't update, until deselection (or after very long time). 

So it's not the lack of available performance, but some other way the marching ants delays thumbnails update. Maybe the fact that on the CPU the marching ants utilize all available cores, without actually maxing out any them is an issue. If the thumbnail update runs with lower priority than the marching ants, then it's maybe blocked by it on every core?

Edited April 7 by death by pixel

[bbrother]

@Dan C is there any progress in solving this problem?

It was first reported in 2021 by a user on the forum and now it is 2024. How long should we wait for this to be fixed?
The layers panel, including thumbnails, is quite an important element in raster graphics editing software.
This thumbnail issue should have been caught by the internal testing team much earlier and fixed as a matter of priority a long time ago.

[Dan C]

16 hours ago, death by pixel said:

I can confirm your observation that having an active selection (marching ants) is delaying the layer thumbnail update substatially. The thumbnails do update within a second after deselection.

Thanks for letting me know - I can confirm this is a known issue which is logged with our development team when a pixel selection is active, I will be sure to bump/update this log with our team now to bring it to their attention once again.

4 hours ago, bbrother said:

How long should we wait for this to be fixed?

Unfortunately our devs don't provide any 'eta' for when specific issues will be resolved - the Affinity Info Bot will post in a thread once the issue has been resolved by our team.