Affinity Photo crashes my PC and it's the only software doing that.

[Artahir]

Hey so something of note that none of the other software I use ever did - Afffinity kills my pc.
I have i9, 64GB of ram, RTX 3090 build that I do 3D rendering with even. But in Affinity I managed to twice kill my pc to point where I had to turn it off the hard way.

It kept running but I couldn't move my mouse, everything was slow, software kept hogging resources and my CPU was full throttle by the sound of it. (couldn't check task manager.)
 

Once was when I tried to rasterize 8k 16-bit TIFF
Second was when I tried to retouch in develop persona. Used healing spot.

There should be fail-safe for software to crash instead of my PC. Like every other software.

[Artahir]

Third time... I just opened export panel when I was done with editing an image for HDR
I'm done with this.

[NathanC]

Hi @Artahir,

Could you confirm if you're running the Windows 11 24H2 update? There have been reports of some users experiencing total system freezes while working in hardware-accelerated apps (such as Affinity) running 24H2. Disabling Hardware Acceleration reportedly alleviates this issue, you can do this by going to Edit -> Settings -> Performance and then unchecking this setting and subsequently restarting for this change to take effect.

The Affinity apps are user-mode applications that aren't able to trigger a system-wide freeze or BSOD, there are likely underlying driver/OS based issues that are causing the freeze. The Windows 11 24H2 update has introduced a number of widespread issues relating to drivers, so if you've recently updated Windows this may be related to the cause. I've linked a forum post below which contains a more detailed explanation of this.

 

 

Edited January 29 by NathanC

[JohnZeman]

I've been having this same problem too except for me it doesn't happen every day.  Sometimes I can go a week or more between total freeze ups, other times the computer will lock up more than once a day.

I just checked and my computer does have the Windows 11 24H2 update installed so now in Affinity Photo I just unchecked the option

*Hardware Acceleration: Enable OpenCL compute

Then I restarted Affinity Photo.

Hopefully this will solve my problem but I may not know for several days.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, NathanC said:

The Affinity apps are user-mode applications that are able to trigger a system-wide freeze or BSOD, there are likely underlying driver/OS based issues that are causing the freeze.

Did you really mean to say that they are able to do that?

[NathanC]

9 hours ago, R C-R said:

Did you really mean to say that they are able to do that?

Nope, edited my post, thanks!

[NathanC]

Nvidia have recently released a new major driver update 576.02 which contains a fix for stability issues relating to the Windows 24H2 update. We’d like to ask all users affected by these system freezes to update to this latest driver version.

Your Drivers can be updated via either the following methods:

1. Manually update via the Nvidia website, found here- https://www.nvidia.com/drivers/
2. Via the Nvidia App found in the System Tray (bottom right hand corner of the taskbar). Once the Nvidia app is open, navigate to the ‘Drivers’ tab and update from here.

Once your drivers have successfully updated, reboot your machine and re-enable ‘Hardware Acceleration’ in the Affinitys apps under Edit -> Settings -> Performance, restart the app and monitor the stability moving forward.

[AndyCham]

On 4/17/2025 at 11:41 AM, NathanC said:

Nvidia have recently released a new major driver update 576.02 which contains a fix for stability issues relating to the Windows 24H2 update. We’d like to ask all users affected by these system freezes to update to this latest driver version.

Your Drivers can be updated via either the following methods:

1. Manually update via the Nvidia website, found here- https://www.nvidia.com/drivers/
2. Via the Nvidia App found in the System Tray (bottom right hand corner of the taskbar). Once the Nvidia app is open, navigate to the ‘Drivers’ tab and update from here.

Once your drivers have successfully updated, reboot your machine and re-enable ‘Hardware Acceleration’ in the Affinitys apps under Edit -> Settings -> Performance, restart the app and monitor the stability moving forward.

Can you tell us if these issues are now resolved.  I need to know if there are specific cards/ranges of cards that are problematic, or those which are not problematic before I build a new PC. It would be good if this could be made more widely known, maybe through FAQs. Thanks.