100% CPU on complex artworks

[vadimyer]

Hello,

 

I've downloaded one of the beautiful samples "Tiger Club", that is a vector artwork, 100 Mb.

 

1) Just scrolling/zooming through the artwork causes 100% CPU spikes and the whole system (like audio being staggering cause of that) to lag at those moments. My monitor's resolution is 3440x1440, editor is at fullscreen. The resolution (as I've discovered) is the part which presumably causes these lags. Resizing the editor window to something like 1920x1080 and scrolling through the same artwork causes spikes up to 50-60% only, and the whole system doesn't lag anymore. Please bear in mind, that I have latest i7-6700 as well, which is 4 physical cores, 8 in HT. I thought Affinity does GPU acceleration though?

 

2) Opening more complex artworks tend to increase the overall stability of the editor, it's like... Imagine having an old browser which is running all tabs as one process, same lag here. I think Photoshop tends to work with multiple huge files OK.

 

3) Once again, panning the artwork almost always isn't smooth, but choppy.

 

Thank you for such a nice, beautiful editor on Windows! It's still *much* smoother and faster than Illustrator, but I just hope I can listen to music while working fullscreen without any hassle =)

[MattP]

Hi vadimyer,

 

1) Affinity does use the GPU to accelerate screen redraw, but it does the document render on the CPU, multi-threaded. Perhaps the Windows version has a more aggressive thread priority for these render threads and it is occupying the whole system for too long, causing the audio glitches.

 

2) That shouldn't be happening - if a window isn't in the foreground it shouldn't receive any input, which means it shouldn't be performing any actions or consuming and processor time. I'm sure we can try to look into it

 

3) That's more of a concern - panning should be smooth. I suspect this is linked to the thread priority of the document rendering not even allowing the view any CPU time to call to the GPU to construct and present the frame. Again, I'm sure we can look into it...

 

Thanks again for your input :)

Matt

[Mark Ingram]

Hi, thanks for your feedback.

 

1) I've experienced the same problems with audio playback. Generally we try to utilise as much CPU as possible, because that improves the experience when using the application, but there might be a way of allowing other lower priority threads to continue. We'll investigate.

 

2) A rendering thread will exist for each document that is open, but as the other documents aren't being edited, nothing will be rendered. You should notice that the application hovers close to 0% usage if you aren't interacting with it (no matter how many documents you have open).

 

3) As Matt says, panning should be super smooth. Out of interest, do you have a HDD or an SSD? What is your graphics card?

 

Thanks,

Mark

[vadimyer]

Hello,

 

I found that specifying affinity for Affinity  :rolleyes: Like 4 CPU out of 8, makes it use no more than 50% of CPU, obviously. And there's plenty of resources available for other tasks. What's more interesting, overall editor's performance remains the same, at least it looks like it.

 

As for panning, I have an SSD, and the graphics card is GTX 750 Ti KALMX. Panning is smooth most of the time, but of course not with huge artworks or when there is some more documents opened.

 

Offtopic: what graphics card would be a total beast for Affinity?  :D

[Mark Ingram]

Hi, your current graphics card should be good enough! More CPU and RAM are the things which would improve performance the most (but your system seems like a decent spec anyway). Can you record a video of your panning performance? I would be interested to see what it looks like.

[vadimyer]

Hello,

 

I got plenty of RAM, yeah, 16 GB.

 

Here's the video, even with the editor's window resized down it's still choppy (video recording eats some resources too): https://youtu.be/LXWfmtjsY7o

 

(if it's of low quality, watch it later, since youtube is producing the 1440p and above for a very long time).

[AdamStanislav]

What was that, Vadim? Did I see Affinity ask you if you have children in that video at 0:35?  :o

[Novak]

Vadim that left portion of your windows bar sugests you have a bit more stuff running than just affinity and player, I'll do the same test on my OOOLLLLDDDDD pc to see if I get the same resault. :)

[Novak]

What was that, Vadim? Did I see Affinity ask you if you have children in that video at 0:35?  :o

Nope, Kaspersky, it seams Vadim has everything running in the background except kitchen sink

[vadimyer]

What was that, Vadim? Did I see Affinity ask you if you have children in that video at 0:35?  :o

LOL yeah, AV is showing some news at the wrong time.

 

Vadim that left portion of your windows bar sugests you have a bit more stuff running than just affinity and player, I'll do the same test on my OOOLLLLDDDDD pc to see if I get the same resault. :)

I think the only things which used CPU at that time were Affinity, Chrome and video recorder  :)

[AdamStanislav]

LOL yeah, AV is showing some news at the wrong time.

 

Oh, yes, they (AVs) can be a pest.

[vadimyer]

The issue with 100% CPU (and thus, lags of the whole system) is really here. My case:

 

- Create new artwork 1280x800. Draw something. Everything's pretty smooth.

- Open that "Tiger Club" or other complex artwork and switch the tab back to the 1280x800 artwork.

- Draw something... Quickly zoom out and in, draw something faster.

- The system starts to lag as if I was working with the complex artworks instead of the one which is simple.

 

And sometimes (though very rarely) the editor lags the system even with just one plain simple empty artwork without anything other opened (once you draw something).

[af-user]

After the time I am using AD now I must say I really like it!

 

I had the experience that it needs powerful hardware.

Affinity Designer is running very well on my Bigtower with i7 + 16GB Memory + GTX 1070 (previously 570 was OK, too).

Affinity Designer was behaving very slow with a bit more complex files on my i5 + 8GB memory + Intel HD3000.

 

On big single curve-objects with many nodes I have seen the follwoing:

• changing the curve with the "handle" to adjust the bending --> is working very well and fast
• moving a node takes up to minutes (i5) even if it only is moved slightly away

 

Edit: Attached an example file

Move-Node-CPU-Usage-Demo-001.afdesign