Affinty Photo 2 - Minimise & maximise from Dock is slow/glitchy

[Scotty77]

So I've updated my Intel MacBook Pro 16" to Ventura 13.7 and am finding Affinity Photo 2 is causing odd dock animation when minimising and maximising.

When there is no document open in Affinity Photo, the app window minimises to the Dock and maximises smoothly. However when a document is open (even a new black document) the genie animation is a bit slower when minimising and really slow when maximising. There is also noticeable glitchy animation of the dock for a second or two when the app is first minimised. See the attached video.

This behaviour wasn't occurring in Monterey at all (using v2.5.5)

This doesn't occur with any other app.

Aside this small point, Affinity Photo 2 is running perfectly.

I have tried deactivating, deleting and reinstalling Affinity Photo, but this doesn't correct the behaviour.

If I set the Dock animation to scale the same behaviour occurs.

It occurs on the MacBook Pro screen and also when my XP Pen display is connected. Quitting the XP Pen driver doesn't fix the behaviour.

Also, you'll notice in the video that when the new document is first opened the mouse pointer is glitchy moving across it. This only lasts a few seconds, like the glitch in the Dock animation when hovering/moving over it after minimising.

My system:

2019 16" i9 MacBook Pro, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5600M graphics

Ventura 13.7

Affinity Photo 2.5.5

Edited November 12, 2024 by Scotty77

[Scotty77]

So after a bit more experimenting I've found that turning off Metal Compute Acceleration (Hardware acceleration) fixes the issue.

But why would this affect how the Dock behaves?

In Monterey I was using Hardware Acceleration and getting great performance... Is it something to do with Metal 3 that was introduced in Ventura?

I like to have Hardware Acceleration on so that I can use the DAUB brushes (the ones with sub-brushes) as these don't play nicely without acceleration?

Maybe I need to downgrade to Monterey...

Edited November 13, 2024 by Scotty77

[Scotty77]

An update to Ventura 13.7.1 corrected the behaviour of the Dock.

Unfortunately, the update introduced another problem... a crazy slow launch time for each of the Affinity apps. Again, no other apps were affected.

Thankfully, a quick search of the forum led me to the following which fixed the problem. Hopefully this will all be useful for someone else until such a time Affinity apps are better optimised.

 

[Scotty77]

This issue - per original post - is presenting again since updating to v2.5.7.