Affinity first light??

[Gasman]

Hi guys

I have been waiting for some time for Affinity photo to come to Windows and first try tonight I was more than a little disapponted :o .

My oldish desktop is a dual core Pentium with 4gb ram which apparently is more than the minimum spec reqd for Affinity (an optimistic 2gb ram is quoted!).

The program itself is very sluggish to launch and a 28mb NEF file took nearly 30secs to load. I forget which persona takes you into tone mapping but when I did that it slowed down so much that in the end I had to kill the power switch which is not the best thing to do to a Windows machine. I could think its time to get a new machine were it not for the fact that two other apps I`ve also been trying out Acdsee Ultimate 10 and Photodirector 8 simply fly when using the same NEF files on my machine and even Lightroom seems quicker than Affinity on my setup.

I know its early days and its in beta so I`ll keep watching and see how it goes for now.

regards

Steve

[Bri-Toon]

If I may add in my say, that sounds normal. 4GB is extremely low for a computer. 10 or at least 8 would be the minimum needed for any computer today. I am sorry to say that though.

 

Something else that wouldn't hurt is to clean up any unwanted files. Unless you still use those other programs, uninstall them or any others that sneakily come with Windows. Then in the Task Manager, disable any unnecessary program in the Startup tab (or msconfig for Windows 7). Then in the Task Manager, expand for more details, and end any processes that are taking up too much memory.

[Patrick Connor]

Gasman,

 

Thanks for your input, as you say these are early days. Your PC is within minimum spec, as you say. Although we have many test PCs and laptops ourselves, real user experience like yours will help us a lot, and we will try to improve the user experience before release while we fix the more obvious bugs.

[Gasman]

Thanks bleduc and Patrick for the replies.

I would agree with bleduc wholeheartedly about the need for more ram and if the other two apps I mention were also as sluggish as Affinity I would no doubt be round the PC shop now

[Bri-Toon]

Have you ever thought about running a Syetem Restore? Normally, it is not recommended, but it was finally addressed in Windows 10. Depending on how far back you first ran into memory problems, you might be able to go back before that time. Just keep in mind that it will get rid of any program you installed after that point, but your files will all stay.

[Gasman]

Hi bleduc

I don't have memory problems the only problem I do have is running Affinity!

[PaulAffinity]

In response to Patrick - '... we will try to improve the user experience before release while we fix the more obvious bugs.'

 

Having spent 30 years in Software Dev. If you have not Produced a Product Technical Architecture that is designed to minimise resources (see posts about RAM usage etc.) then the UE is not going to improve much. I REALLY hope I am proven wrong!

 

I have an old Satellite Pro - AMD Dual-Core Processor E1-1200 APU with AMD Radeon™ HD 7310 Graphics, 250Gb SSD and 8Gb RAM - everything flies in LR and Photoshop. Affinity, however is another matter.

 

I will be gutted if I have to spend another 4 years on ADOBE, but if it spending £8 a month with them or £600+ on a new laptop I don't need for Affinity......

 

P

[SrPx]

IMO, you might consider the product , as I understood it, kind of "comes" form Mac OS world. Moving to an entire new platform is kindda like moving from your house, lol, just much worse (someone pls let me know if am wrong, but that's what i understood...)... Besides (not a developer, but I have worked with devrs practically all my professional life) IMO betas and alphas do improve when they reach further in development (otherwise how anyone would be able to explain why for example Blender is getting more performance with updates in many areas (sculpting, rendering times, etc, etc, even when the application size and complexity is grown. Even ps improvements for performance never stop to be added.), and that's not about beta status, is just normal development flow)  , is the possible fact that they are porting everything to a new platform , and a bit less natural for them, which is key for very particular optimizations. In a company I worked at, we started to have seriously good optimizations when a win32 ninja got to work for the company. All of the other guys where more of a Linux/Mac nature.

 

Patience is key here, my 2c. 

 

PD: the cpu seems particularly underpowered....

[SrPx]

Heck... is consumer grade but very low end.. only 1.4 Ghz... no offense, but with PS you really need to deal with a 2 ghz cpu to be at least barely comfortable.... (not to mention that AMD cpus at same speed, tend to be slower, by benchmarks and real life tests)

 

Have a look at benchmarks, just run it against my i7 from 2009 (that's 7+ years computer) , which was intermediate computer at the time. (not the extreme platform, and in the standard gamma, several much better cores were above by the times, I decided to stay in the middle, as usually do. )

 

 

 

Even a today's low end i3 6100 (dirty cheap, btw) is quite better, by far. I bet even an even cheaper pentium g4520 (3.6 ghz)  is way more powerful....indeed... it is... And those are super cheap...

 

 

Would I'd like to do almost instant renders with Blender cycles with my core i7 860 ? yep. Is that physically possible? Nope. I know I will have to purchase an average today's graphic card for gpu render or upgrade to an hexacore. So is life.  ;D

 

No offense, or anything intended. But we should get deep into those facts, too, whenever is mentioned that "AP is slow". (I mean, about which hardware are we really speaking about, the beta status, and considering it is probably an entire move from one platform to another. )

 

Edit: I am indeed surprised you can do graphics work with it... Anything in the Adobe suite or Autodesk's would make you suffer at least in making some things other than super basic or browsing the net (with few tabs). And imo, loading hyper large images, raw ones, etc, and applying cpu intensive filters is not for what this cpu was designed in its elder times.  Is a family consumer grade machine a bit like an athlon x2, similar to a not very powerful celeron, and lower than any core i3 today, and most, if not all, the modern dirty cheap pentiums.

[SrPx]

About cost... dunno, my area and country is far from ideal for get a good price (much better is the US) ,but even here :

 

Pentium g4400 -- 61 €

Mother board H110M with ddr4 support --- 58 €

Tower with 450W power supply (which is enough!) --- 37 €

RAM 8gb ddr4 Kingston --- 51 €

 

You have great ssd disk, is your best component, no need for any other one.

That cpu comes with a little card. but quite underpowered. you might add 130 more for a gtx 750gti, but that can be done later on.

 

Total:  207 euros.

 

Unless you are absolutely tied to a laptop (dunno, you can keep the one you have now for when moving), IMO you would see benefit from using a better hardware. And indeed, performance would be much greater just by choosing instead an i5 6400 (3.3 ghz, 170 euros more, leaving it at 377 euros total) or i3 6100 (+60 euros, total of 267 euros) . Which is far from £600 that you say. (700 euros !! )

 

the one I mention is already MUCH more powerful than your machine. But consider the ideal would be an i5 6600k or better, i7 6700k. You can upgrade later on to those, by buying them first hand or second hand. The h110m board would allow you that. And of course, putting a gtx750, 950 or newer 1060. or even an older 6xx second hand, at any time you had some other extra bucks. IMO, computers stuff is all about from at least every 7 years updating a bit, even if just a minimum... 

[Gasman]

Hi SrPx

Thanks for the reply. I think you may have misunderstood me or I have not explained myself correctly?. I agree entirely that a faster pc is always better for newly written software (or even old software) and not being a software writer myself I`m not really aware of the ins and outs of efficient coding to speculate about why one software runs fast where another runs slow but I am a software user and if one software package is written in a particular way to enable older hardware to run ok then it seems perfectly reasonable to expect similar software packages to also run ok on the same hardware. Clearly the coding in Affinity ( as excellent as it may be ;) ) is written in a different way to say `Acdsee Ultimate 10` or `Photodirector 8` or indeed another I`ve tried `On1 photo 10`. All four of these packages arguably do the same thing eg edit raw files, my question is simply if these three apps can do it then why not all similar type apps?.

regards

Steve

[SrPx]

Well, probably because those 4 are not in beta status anymore, plus also being a while around (I used Acdsee back in 2001), so, time for a zillion of fixes and optimizations,  because have not just arrived from Mac OS platform (if I am right in that theory), and also don't forget that all those are somewhat more specialized tools (ie, Photo seems to aim to quite a number of areas), the code can be smaller, easier to optimize, manage, etc. :).  IMHO.