Greyscale boxes / unrendered portions of image while zooming or moving around

[Synergist]

While developing some HDR stacks, I've noticed that after a few images, I get artboard corruption. At various zoom levels, part of the image simply disappears, replaced by the grey checkerbox texture. The 'missing' squares will also change depending on zoom level, where I am scrolling around in the viewport, etc.

I'm running Windows 11 23H2, on a machine with a Ryzen 9 7950X and RTX 4090 (latest drivers) and 64 GB of RAM. No performance or utilisation warnings, and files still develop and save correctly although the working previews are screwed up. I have to completely close and reopen Affinity Photo to fix it.

I've recorded a short video demonstrating the bug:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-eT196HQdKHTpAcg0Zq34iRkZe5vzcUt/view?usp=sharing

 

Performance settings: Bilinear view quality, RAM usage limit set at a reasonable level (previously the default which was ~45 GB, temporarily increased to ~52 GB), OpenCL acceleration enabled.

[Synergist]

Interestingly it also seems to bake in the corruption into the thumbnail preview inside the .afphoto file that's shown in Windows Explorer, although all the pixel data appears to be correct when the file is reopened. Example of two files:

[GarryP]

Have you tried switching Hardware Acceleration OFF in Settings / Performance?

[Synergist]

4 hours ago, GarryP said:

Have you tried switching Hardware Acceleration OFF in Settings / Performance?

Admittedly not yet, I logged this just after finishing last night and didn't have time to go back in and spend 30-40 mins waiting for the fault to reproduce. I'll try again today though.

I was wondering if it may be buggy hardware acceleration. If so would this ever potentially be fixed?

[GarryP]

It would be very difficult (practically impossible) for Serif to test the hardware acceleration for all of the relevant functionalities against all of the types/versions of all of the various graphics cards/drivers and software/hardware configurations.

As such, it works for some people and doesn’t work for others, sometimes for different reasons, sometimes with different functionalities.

All we can do is try it, and if we have problems with it then we can turn it off. (Why it is switched ON by default is a question which has been asked and answered(?) elsewhere in the forums.)

Serif do make it more robust over time, but they can only work with the information they have.

If you join the beta programme you can do testing with that and report any problems you get because of hardware acceleration, and that might help them to make the commercial versions better.

[Synergist]

Hi Garry

I'll admit I was slightly surprised by this issue given the mainstream configuration of this machine with fairly decent hardware. I appreciate you can't practically validate every hardware & driver combination and odd issues like this happen, a challenge I'm familiar with in my own line of work.

I was mostly surprised that the issues occurred despite it being what I presumed was a fairly mature hardware acceleration implementation for raster operations. Other graphics and video editing programmes from other major vendors don't seem to exhibit these issues on the same hardware & driver combination.

Are there any more detailed diagnostic/debug logs you reckon it might be worth extracting, to either post or investigate, that might be useful?

[NathanC]

Hi @Synergist,

In terms of logging unfortunately not, the Log.txt provides some additional context on display adapters and driver versions, but you've already confirmed your Graphics interfaces and driver version.

H/A takes advantage of multiple GPUs, including Integrated (iGPU) graphics from your CPU, you could therefore try updating your iGPU drivers from AMD's website to confirm this isn't causing the issue.

https://www.amd.com/en/support/downloads/drivers.html/processors/ryzen/ryzen-7000-series/amd-ryzen-9-7950x.html

I'd also recommend re-installing the latest Nvidia driver from their website, during the install process, select the 'Custom Install' option and select 'perform a clean installation' checkbox to clear off any potentially faulty areas of the previous driver, you could then try the workflow with H/A again.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/