Relevant hardware components for Affinity software (PC)

[verysame]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

You are asking us to guess about what tasks you will be doing with the graphics software; how often you will be doing each of them; the typical pixel dimensions, number of layers, raster, text, & vector objects your projects will include; what your budget is now & in the immediate future; & several other factors. All of them will play a part in determining what is the 'best fit' configuration to maximize performance for your particular needs, even if you never run any other software (which will never happen in the real world if you use Windows or any other modern OS).

 

If that is not equivalent to asking for a "one size fits all" answer, then nothing is.

 

Oh, come on. The op was clear about what's the main use for the machine, which is affinity.

This is the only forum I've been in years where a clear question can trigger so much talking which in the end does not answer the question at all.

An analog question on any C4D, 3dsMax, Houdini, Blender or whatever other grafic forum would give a more direct insight on what's the best approach. Of course no one has the crystal ball and knows what's going to work 100% because nothing can work 100% given all the variables, but there are general guidelines that can help. Same guidelines that helped when I built my box a few years ago which still works great. By the way, the answer the op needed arrived from Manuel.

[R C-R]

24 minutes ago, verysame said:

By the way, the answer the op needed arrived from Manuel.

He did not say anything had not already been said. Consider for example MEB's "For heavy workload we do take advantage of a higher number of cores dividing the work between them. For light work the clock speed of each core does affect greatly the performance of the application, so ideally you would want a multi core system with high clock rates." Please explain how you think that would help the OP decide on the optimum number of CPU cores & their speed when building a machine purpose built to run Affinity any better than the generic "more is better" guideline already had.

[verysame]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

He did not say anything had not already been said. Consider for example MEB's "For heavy workload we do take advantage of a higher number of cores dividing the work between them. For light work the clock speed of each core does affect greatly the performance of the application, so ideally you would want a multi core system with high clock rates." Please explain how you think that would help the OP decide on the optimum number of CPU cores & their speed when building a machine purpose built to run Affinity any better than the generic "more is better" guideline already had.

 

He did say something specific: for instance, GPUs are quite irrelevant, and not because in theory things would make or would not make sense to optimize in that sense, but because Affinity simply doesn't take any advantage from the GPU at the moment.

But let's not wander here, because what I was reacting to in your post is this:

 

Quote

You are asking us to guess about what tasks you will be doing with the graphics software; how often you will be doing each of them; the typical pixel dimensions, number of layers, raster, text, & vector objects your projects will include; what your budget is now & in the immediate future; & several other factors. 

 

 

To figure out what could be the best solution when building a new box, one doesn't need to know all the things you stated above.

The OP said something very specific regarding a new box for Affinity products. Now, if there's no best recommendation for that, it is not because of all the implication you mentioned before, but for a different, simpler, reason:

 

Quote

Affinity apps don't have any specific optimisations in place for any config.

 

That is, as of now no matter what you build, "we haven't optimised our products for anything in particular."

Again, not because is not possible, but because they just didn't (resources? time? young product? to name a few).

Other companies do recommend specific hardware and for a reason.

You can continue arguing about it, it's up to you, but like I said before, this is a very particular forum when it comes to some topics.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, verysame said:

That is, as of now no matter what you build, "we haven't optimised our products for anything in particular."

That is not a direct quote, nor does it mean what MEB actually said. As he did say, for heavy workloads Affinity does take advantage of more cores, so it is optimized in that respect. But he also said that for lighter loads clock speed of the cores is important, so once again I ask you to explain exactly how this helps the OP decide which of the many mullti-core CPU's available he should choose.

[carl123]

57 minutes ago, R C-R said:

....so once again I ask you to explain exactly how this helps the OP decide which of the many mullti-core CPU's available he should choose.

It helps me...

My use of AP would be called light as I mainly use it for minor photo retouching, cropping, etc so I would go for a CPU with a high clock speed and not worry about the number of cores it has as my work would probably never use more than one.

[toltec]

10 hours ago, verysame said:

By the way, the answer the op needed arrived from Manuel.

 

"answer"?

Did you read the OPs post ? There was more than one question. 

 

Which of the following OPs questions have been answered ?

Apart from the RAM advised at 8 or 16.

(But how much RAM should we use?

 

The more the better, of course, but is there a limit above it is irrelevant?

Such as 16GB, 32GB, 64GB…?  Or more is always best?)

Regarding CPU. Affinity apps are optimized for how many cores? 4? 6? 8?

The more the better?

What is more relevant in terms of CPU – frequency or number of cores?

Regarding graphics. Affinity apps take advantage of discrete GPUs?

What is preferable, nVidia or AMD?

Is the amount of RAM in the graphics card relevant (besides what is needed for a given screen resolution, such as 2K or 4K, of course)?

More than 2GB in the card is relevant?

 

And who is Manuel ?

[aempress]

14 hours ago, verysame said:

An analog question on any C4D, 3dsMax, Houdini, Blender or whatever other grafic forum would give a more direct insight on what's the best approach. Of course no one has the crystal ball and knows what's going to work 100% because nothing can work 100% given all the variables, but there are general guidelines that can help. Same guidelines that helped when I built my box a few years ago which still works great. By the way, the answer the op needed arrived from Manuel.

Exactly...! 

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, carl123 said:

It helps me...

My use of AP would be called light as I mainly use it for minor photo retouching, cropping, etc so I would go for a CPU with a high clock speed and not worry about the number of cores it has as my work would probably never use more than one.

Even for "light" retouching, Affinity Photo on my iMac routinely uses more than one core, but more to the point how many users will only or mostly use the app for anything that could realistically be characterized as "light work"? Among other things, just using some of the retouching brush tools on moderately large sections of high resolution images or developing RAW files is going to use more cores when they are available, so for most users it would be just as unwise not to consider the number of cores as it would be not to consider their clock speed. MEB made it very clear that both should be considered.

 

Regarding the general guidelines suggested for other apps on other forums, it is really not much different from this one -- different users have different ideas about that & all the support staff will usually say about it is to quote the minimum specs & in so many words add that more is better. For anything more specific, like to answer the questions asked by @aempress about frequency vs. number of cores, at a minimum would require some idea of how he intended to use the app (& some idea of the available budget), but it would still involve guesswork. 

[verysame]

---

 

 

[verysame]

On 10/31/2017 at 0:20 AM, toltec said:

 

"answer"?

Did you read the OPs post ? There was more than one question. 

[...]

And who is Manuel ?

2

 

Manuel was a mistype, I meant Miguel.

I did read the OP's post, did you read what I quoted from Miguel's reply?

It's an important statement which seems is going unnoticed. Which is the answer.

 

On 10/30/2017 at 11:19 PM, R C-R said:

That is not a direct quote, nor does it mean what MEB actually said. As he did say, for heavy workloads Affinity does take advantage of more cores, so it is optimized in that respect. But he also said that for lighter loads clock speed of the cores is important, so once again I ask you to explain exactly how this helps the OP decide which of the many mullti-core CPU's available he should choose.

 

At this point, I'm not sure if you are just ignoring what I write or you are here just to have fun.
The italic was me paraphrasing, the actual quote from Miguel is in my post. If you want to ignore it, fine, I'm done.

 

18 hours ago, R C-R said:

Even for "light" retouching, Affinity Photo on my iMac routinely uses more than one core, but more to the point how many users will only or mostly use the app for anything that could realistically be characterized as "light work"? Among other things, just using some of the retouching brush tools on moderately large sections of high resolution images or developing RAW files is going to use more cores when they are available, so for most users it would be just as unwise not to consider the number of cores as it would be not to consider their clock speed. MEB made it very clear that both should be considered.

 

Regarding the general guidelines suggested for other apps on other forums, it is really not much different from this one -- different users have different ideas about that & all the support staff will usually say about it is to quote the minimum specs & in so many words add that more is better. For anything more specific, like to answer the questions asked by @aempress about frequency vs. number of cores, at a minimum would require some idea of how he intended to use the app (& some idea of the available budget), but it would still involve guesswork. 

2

 

Funny, in our past conversations you were pointing out that my idea of focusing on performance optimization due to heavy work was only an assumption and at best related only to a few people (or to my cluttered, imprecise survey). Now, instead, you ask "how many users will only or mostly use the app for anything that could realistically be characterized as "light work"?" I find your posts inconsistent.

About the other forums, it is different, if you want to disagree go ahead. I've been on 3d forums for years and this forum is yet the most "unique" when it comes to these type of posts.

Anyway, I spent more than enough time on this thread.

 

One thing is clear to me now: Affinity has never been optimized for any particular hardware configuration, and I can get that. It's only disappointing that so many threads and a waste of time like this one have been spent on this forum when it would have been much more simple and clear, at least in terms of communication from Serif, to say it right away. A sticky thread would also be very welcome.

Some of us even spent time trying to figure out whether this or that GPU would matter (or if it would matter at all), only to get official words in that regards some time later.

Why all this hardware matter has never been put black on white since the very beginning, I don't know. An overlooked topic? A forgotten topic? A "we don't even know yet and we are still figuring this out" topic?

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, verysame said:

Funny, in our past conversations you were pointing out that my idea of focusing on performance optimization due to heavy work was only an assumption and at best related only to a few people (or to my cluttered, imprecise survey).

I have no idea where you got the impression that I was saying anything like that. Throughout the discussion I have said as clearly as I know how that we can't assume anything about what the workload will be for any user. As you said yourself, there are too many variables to do anything more than suggest some general guidelines.

 

It is not enough to say that the main use will be with Affinity, or even if it will mostly be used to perform a few tasks like cropping or "minor retouching," whatever that might include. Affinity will use whatever system resources are available to it at any given time, but there is no way to know more than vaguely what they will be without considering every process that may run concurrently with it. The OS will run various processes that have nothing to do with Affinity, as well as processes that support system services Affinity uses. The idea that the workload consists only of whatever tasks users perform with Affinity is wrong on several different levels -- preemptive multitasking OS's don't work like that.

 

Questions about if or how many cores Affinity (or any other app) is "optimized" for don't have simple answers because they are really about how much of it is multithreaded, another form of concurrency that divides processes into threads if & when they can run independently of each other when the system resources are available to do that. Not all processes can be multithreaded, & some that can don't actually benefit from it because the overhead of preventing race conditions, making sure shared data isn't stale, & so on takes so long to do that there are no net gains in performance.

 

So the bottom line is even for apps that claim they are optimized for certain hardware configurations, it is actually much more complicated than that ... & sometimes more about marketing hype than technical merit.

[aempress]

On ‎01‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 8:32 AM, verysame said:

One thing is clear to me now: Affinity has never been optimized for any particular hardware configuration, and I can get that. It's only disappointing that so many threads and a waste of time like this one have been spent on this forum when it would have been much more simple and clear, at least in terms of communication from Serif, to say it right away. A sticky thread would also be very welcome.

Some of us even spent time trying to figure out whether this or that GPU would matter (or if it would matter at all), only to get official words in that regards some time later.

Why all this hardware matter has never been put black on white since the very beginning, I don't know. An overlooked topic? A forgotten topic? A "we don't even know yet and we are still figuring this out" topic?

Basically, this is it. The answer I've been looking for – even if it was not the one I was expecting.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, aempress said:

Basically, this is it. The answer I've been looking for – even if it was not the one I was expecting.

Not being optimized for any particular hardware configuration does not mean it is not optimized for better performance for any hardware configuration. On the contrary, MEB made it clear that Affinity is optimized to take advantage both of more cores & higher core clock speeds, depending on the workload (which includes the load created by system overhead).