Affinity Photo 2.4.0 keeps crashing (for me)

[pfi]

Again, I am getting so frustrated with APh because it keeps crashing on me.  After some time I have been using APh today  and I have already had a number of crashes, doing normal things.

It frustrates me, because I spend a lot of time editing my images, and when APh crashes it provides absolutely no recovery and I have to start again.

I have paid for this software and I have several times reported crashes. I am honestly trying to make APh work for me, but I am getting close to asking for my money back.  I am not hearing back from Affinity, other than that my hardware is not at fault and that other people experiencing similar crashes.

What can I do, please?

Attached the latest crash reports.

f56c8d85-112a-497d-abf1-1835db931a01.dmp ccfac932-a06a-4132-b9d0-f2ba0c9b1dde.dmp abe1017f-ad3e-456e-89b6-48e9604957b2.dmp

[Pyanepsion]

Hello, @pfi,

The problem of crashes is often the most difficult for software manufacturers to correct, because the user is generally unaware of what has caused them and how to reproduce them.

I invite you to report the problem again and again, each time providing as much information as possible. This type of investigation requires precise knowledge of the hardware, the software environment, the tasks carried out at the same time, the precise circumstances of the manipulations, and as many screen copies and video recordings as possible. Providing the file that caused the crash can also help.

[GarryP]

@pfi This section of the forums is for the beta software only.

If you are still using the beta software then you should probably update the commercial release to 2.4.0 and use that instead as the beta will be ‘expiring’ soon.

If you are using the 2.4.0 commercial release then you should be posting in a different bug section of the forums.

[pfi]

Thank you for moving this topic to the right forum.

I probably have mentioned the following observations before, but maybe they are worth repeating.

- As I keep seeing crashes immediately after start-up or on early activities after startup (I just had another crash on focus-merge and clove action). Uninitialized attributes/variables?

- Once APh is stable and I have worked on maybe 20+ images, some weird behavior starts showing, like saturated pixels in the image, or clearly zoned areas (rectangular) of the image suddenly appear different to the rest (like brightness, contrast, saturation..).  For me this is usually a sign to save what I can and exit and restart APh. Memory leak?

[DWright]

Hi @pfi from your crash reports this issue appears to be with the OpenCL acceleration, can you please try starting Affinity Photo while holding down the CTRL key and when the Clear User Data screen appears select the Disable Hardware Acceleration option and click the Clear button.

[pfi]

I have disabled hardware acceleration, and restarted APh. I then opened 7 JPG images, have processed 3 of them and closed them, because APh started to run painfully slow (like lag  time of 7sec+ to execute any adjustments).  No crash (yet) happened in this case.

For the image (featured in the attached video) I changed the Document>ConvertFormat>Format from RGB/8 to RGB/16 and got the strange effects that I mentioned in my previous post above (2nd point).

The attached image shows my current PerformanceSettings, as well as the Win10-TaskManager top CPU usage - cooling fans running at the highest level by just hovering&moving the 'cursor' over the image while showing the APh PerformanceSettings. (The other image shows the TaskManager performance chart)

I am NOT a PC expert, but I have been wondering if my PC configuration is wrong, wrt. CPU allocation, memory allocation, swap file etc. - any help would be appreciated - thanks.