Designer 2.4 vector brush lag on RTX4090

[AndreRduce]

I have kind of a beefy machine (4090 GPU, 64GB Ram, 8TB M2 SSD 7000/7000, i9-13900K) but it does not seem to help when using the vector brush tool. It ignores the use of GPU as can bee seen in this video (CPU spikes for simple drawing) and is lagging a lot even if I just juse the simple ink brush.

• To the date I have the latest geforce drivers
• To the date I have installed all windows updates
• If it matters: Monitor is a Samsung G9 57 inch 8k

It seems like there are more people with these troubles bug I have neither seen an official response to them (I may have missed it) and they have been active for years.

• Is this some missing setting on my behalf?
• Is this being worked on?
• What can I do to help in terms of sending debug data?

 

[DWright]

If you turn off OpenCL acceleration do you experience the same amount of lag when drawing with the brush.

[AndreRduce]

At work now, will test at home. But tested on the work laptop (Quadro P2000 card and Xeon cpu laptop, Thinkpad P52). No to minimal lag, both with and without OpenCL.

[AndreRduce]

I can confirm now that turning off OpenCL did not help (and yes, I restarted the app).

[AndreRduce]

@DWright is this tool CPU or GPU bound or both? Do you have any ideas of things I can try switching on/off etc?

[HappyDoom]

@DWright Same problem for me.
Since 2.4 my vector brush with and without active OpenCL became laggy. Happens in Designer and Publisher and it's only the vector brush, not the pencil.
(Windows 11, Ryzen 7900, RTX 4070 TI Super, latest studio driver)

[HappyDoom]

Hi @DWright 
It's version 2.5.2 now + all latest drivers, (Nvidia Studio) but the problem remains.
Like in the video from @AndreRduce, when I draw a line, my CPU usage is up to 100%, while my GPU is bored below 10%. Doesn't designer like Nvidias latest GPU's?
I can't work with that.

[PhilippK]

Hi,

I'd like to chip in with the exact same problem. Tried it with and without HW accel., RTX 4070, i7 13700k, 32GB RAM. Everything else works fine and fast, but the vector brush tool starts lagging pretty much immediately when I start drawing. Once I let go of the mouse or pen, the whole curve suddenly appears.

To me it looks like A. Designer tries to compute and render intermediate curves such that it completely overloads the CPU and once you let go of the mouse or pen it just jumps to the final result. 

It only happens for brushes based on textures not on solid brushes. It would be really great if someone from the Affinity team could actually have a look at this. I found this Reddit link that seems to describe the same issue and it has been going on for a while.

[HappyDoom]

I'd like to add, that it seems like the Affinity apps won't make much use of my GPU in general, no matter with or without hardware acceleration. In Publisher for example, I made some complex test document with many objects, photos, text, effects etc. and just by zooming in, I noticed that my CPU jumped to 100% while the GPU almost did nothing. Publisher then became laggy of course and it took quite a while to zoom in. You're the experts, but it looks to me like there's some big problem with NVIDIA GPU's, from all the threats I read so far.

[PhilippK]

@DWright Are there any news on this topic or is there something we could assist you with to more easily find out what the issue is all about? What I do observe is that while drawing with the vector brush tool (based on a texture) and AD is lagging, all 24 logical processors on my computer are fully maxed out to 100%.

Edited October 1, 2024 by PhilippK
Better phrasing.

[HappyDoom]

It now takes like around 20/30 secs just from zooming in and refreshing the resolution for getting a clear image. (in all apps)
I'd be relieved if you could confirm, that this will be fixed at least with the very next update.

 

[PhilippK]

For myself, I can say I do not have the issues with zooming, so far only with the vector brush. Since this thread's topic is about the vector brush tool specifically, I would suggest you open another thread for the zooming issue.
I have to say, I am quite disappointed that not a single person form the Affinity team has answered to this issue at all since the end of march. I do understand that there is a probably a lot going on, but not even a single response for over half a year is quite low.

[HappyDoom]

21 minutes ago, PhilippK said:

For myself, I can say I do not have the issues with zooming, so far only with the vector brush. Since this thread's topic is about the vector brush tool specifically, I would suggest you open another thread for the zooming issue.
I have to say, I am quite disappointed that not a single person form the Affinity team has answered to this issue at all since the end of march. I do understand that there is a probably a lot going on, but not even a single response for over half a year is quite low.

 Hi Philipp. In a different thread from someone else with the same problem, a staff member at least mentioned he'd pass it to the devs, but yeah, it's frustrating.
I wouldn't mind a couple of updates with nothing but bugfixes instead of new features. : )

I know, I mentioned the zooming, but my impression is, that it's related to the same root of problems. I have the slow vector brushes too, (CPU going wild, GPU snoozing) and the screenshot could also represent working with the vector brush. It would be the same image of stats. But what I'm guessing is, that the problems are related. From all the posts I read in several threads, we all seem to have in common, that we're using NVidia GPU's from the 40's generation. So, I did't want to start even another thread and this is more an additional hint for the devs.
We'll see 🤷‍♂️

[HappyDoom]

I don't know how much it has of an impact on the Affinity apps, but I'm using the Nvidia app instead of Geforce Experience and I just noticed, that Designer seems to have trouble getting valuated/optimised and maybe that's also related to the whole problem. Publisher wouldn't even show up btw.. I tried it several times, un/re installed Designer, no change. As I mentioned before, the vector-brush problem, laggy working with my current document (it's admittedly big, tried it in all 3 apps) and the CPU 100% / GPU snoozing behavior might be all rooted in the GPU driver.

Here's a screenshot from my Nvidia app.
It says: Couldn't load optimal values. Try again later.
So to me it looks like some disconnect to the driver.

@PhilippK and @AndreRduce, do you also experience that?

 

[PhilippK]

@HappyDoom Thanks for the info, I will check this asap and give post what I can find out.

[PhilippK]

@HappyDoom

I installed the Nvidia App, and I actually have the same issue as you with both Designer and Photo. However, on both applications it still does say "Enable OpenCL (Compute Acceleration): On", so I am a bit confused here.

[HappyDoom]

Thanks for checking and it really is confusing.
In my case it looks like after every reboot the optimised settings for Photo are undone, so I'd have to click optimise again. And the non evaluation problem for Designer remains. I'm wondering why this problem with lag in brushes and almost no use of GPU power wouldn't appear more often in this forum. Maybe it's really limited to the 40's series from NVidia in combination with Windows 11, while most users here might be posh mac users, who knows? ; )

I don't know what else to check or do, I just hope for relief in 2.6..

[HCl]

.

[HappyDoom]

24 minutes ago, Return said:

I have a 3060ti and no lag when using HW on. 
Only when HW off and using very large brushes it lags.

I had a discussion with former staff member @Dan C sometime way back where it was wise to turn off the video connection on the motherboard when not in use for any screen.
So try to disable it in your setup and only use the nvidia card
One could test things with the benchmark tool in photo to see how much resources it uses with or without the motherboard video option enabled or not.
Perhaps this could work for you if at all possible

 

Thanks Return for jumping in. I already deactivated my Ryzen's intigrated graphics, so I'm running on my NVidia solely all the time. I also tried it with and without HW in all apps, no change. The vector brush size also makes no difference, there's always lag. Good idea with the benchmarks tho, here are mine for Photo.

 

[PhilippK]

For completeness, here are my results as well:

 

The test "Vector (Single CPU)" delivers different scores, usually in the range either 180-230 OR 480-550. I assume that is because sometimes Intel decides to use an e-core and sometimes a p-core to finish the test.

[AndreRduce]

Thanks for keeping this thread alive guys.

 

No updates from my side, I am at work here and I have laptop with a Quadro Card and a Xeon CPU, so I can post the benchmark from it here, will post from my machine at home later.

 

[AndreRduce]

Here is the benchmark on my 4090

Same problem in NVIDIA app, unable to fetch settings for Affinity apps

And here are the rig details from NVIDIA app

NVIDIA system information report created on: 11/13/2024 19:37:56
NVIDIA app version: 11.0.1.163
Operating system: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro, Version 10.0.22631
DirectX runtime version: DirectX 12
Driver: Game Ready Driver - 566.14 - Tue Nov 12, 2024
CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K
RAM: 64.0 GB
Storage (6): HDD - 16.4 TB,SSD - 1.9 TB,+4 more

Graphics card
GPU processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Direct3D feature level: 12_1
CUDA cores: 16384
Graphics clock: 2520 MHz
Resizable bar: Yes
Memory data rate: 21.00 Gbps
Memory interface: 384-bit
Memory bandwidth: 1.01 TB/s
Total available graphics memory: 57202 MB
Dedicated video memory: 24564 MB GDDR6X
System video memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 32638 MB
Video BIOS version: 95.02.18.80.53
IRQ: Not used
Bus: PCI Express x16 Gen4
Device ID: 10DE 2684 F29710B0
Part number: G139 0330

Display (1): Samsung Odyssey G95NC
Resolution: 7680 x 2160 (native)
Refresh rate: 120 Hz
Desktop color depth: Highest (32-bit)
Display technology: Variable Refresh Rate
HDCP: Supported

 

[PhilippK]

2.5.6. No changes, no comments, no status update.