Would a better video card help me?

[RPC]

Designer is slow on big/complex files but only using 20~% CPU and 30~% RAM
So I was wondering if a better video card would make a noticeable difference.
Currently using a 970 GTX

[v_kyr]

Nope, AD does use the GPU mostly only for panning / zooming and common screen drawing, so it's not used for any further data processing here. - Instead AD generally benefits much more from multicore CPU processing. So having a capable CPU, enough RAM and fast mass storage (ssd/hdd) counts overall more here!

[RPC]

Based on that description it very well may be the video card causing my bottleneck. 

It's the Panning and Zooming that's getting slow and making things hard to work with.

 

My CPU is 7700k, RAM is 32GB of good quality DDR4 and my SSD is a dual Samsung 850 pro setup.

The main thing is that AD isn't using much of either. Only 30~% of ram is in use and the majority of that is going to other programs AD is only using around 2-4GB when Zooming and panning the canvas goes fuzzy and AD seems to be struggling hard the CPU load peaks at 41% for 1 second and than drops down to 20% for the few more seconds it takes before things render clear.

 

So maybe to re-phase my question since it really dose sound like the video card:

For better zooming, panning draws would their be a good benefit to moving to a different video card.

 

 

 

[RPC]

Attached is a example screenshot.

Well zooming and panning I am often left with sections of the canvas that look fuzzy and lag behind for some time.

Similar effects also happen well moving complex or a number of simple objects around as well. the move will become very laggy/fuzzy and hard to position, however neither the CPU nor ram are being used much at all.

[v_kyr]

AFAI recall there were certain people which already had problems with the Affinity products and NVidia drivers under Windows. If you do a search here in the forum or via Google after such topics you should find some threads related to these themes. - However, I don't know if these have been sorted out by the latest software updates. Also it's possible that AD can make better use of OpenGL/OpenCL here than Cuda, so you might check if altering the GPU driver settings possibly makes any difference here or not.

[RPC]

I had forgotten GPU-Z had a monitor to show GPU load and it seems the GPU isn't being pushed hardly at all either.

 

I tired looking on the forum and couldn't find anything useful, all the things I could find related to full blown issues or AD not working at all. In my case it works fine, as long as things stay in the low range of things it works fast and smooth and I have no other errors.

 

Unlike the old days I couldn't find any true alternative Nivida drivers I did try using the ones from their site rather than the default installed by windows to no benefit.

 

Doing a general search on google I tried a number of Nivida program settings that had lead to better OpenGL performance in other programs to no benefit either. 

 

If I had the money to toss at it, it would be quite interesting to see a AMD vs Nivida benchmark of AD to see if there's really any effect, but most of the other programs I use benefit quite a bit from CUDA so it's not something I'd want to do on a whim.

[RPC]

Out of the two rather old AMD cards I do have:

 

4850 HD and a Firepro V4800 

 

There wasn't any noticeable difference between them they are both roughly the same raw power but the Firepro tends to normally be better at OpenGL due to the better driver support. Though sadly I wouldn't say either of them was a huge loss compared to the 970 GTX either. Rendering speed is only about maybe 2.5x faster on the 970 GTX as the two rather ancient AMD cards. 

[RPC]

Well at my sisters today I tested on her system and with a much older CPU (Intel 2600k), Nvidia 1050, an older HDD, and only 4GB of ram her system provided such a similar match to mine with AD that it would be hard to tell the difference at all.

 

Which dose make me think that either Nvidia cards are indeed having issues on windows 7 and 10 with AD or there's a major bottleneck in ADs code itself.

 

If anyone on the forums has a windows system running a modern mid to higher-end AMD video card I'd be very interested to know how well it's really performing.

[v_kyr]

Well I think it's more due to AD's Win code here at all, since if all other software things do run well and fluid on your system, you can narrow it down to it. - Further I highly doubt that buying another GPU here just for AD will change much at all!

See also this thread here about AP performance and look over several peoples post in terms of used Win system components to get an idea.

[RPC]

Indeed I run plenty of other heavy weight software and have no issues.

I fear there is no point in trying to get more speed from AD at this point, especially after reading the AP thread and noticing that it at the very least is stressing hardware. Which at least tells you even though AP windows code is inefficient you can still brute force it a little. AD on the other hand based on my testing bottlenecks and taps out long before it stresses anything. Very rarely dose it even use more than 3 CPU threads, spending time watching GPU utilization well running it it barely peaks the 970 to 31% and only uses about half the VRAM.

 

So until something changes in the AD code there seems to be a virtual wall in the way. Which is to bad, it's not like I'll stop using AD it's still vastly nicer to work with AI. A bit limiting and now slower that I'm working with bigger files but the nicer interface is still worth it.

 

On the bright side based on what I see, if they ever get the bottleneck figured out and fixed than AD should gain a huge performance boost on my system, just by virtue of actually using the resources at hand.

[RPC]

Just got a 1080 ti for a good price since people are moving to 2xxx cards.

Just wanted to add/update to this topic that there is a night and day difference in how well large complex files with lots of effects are handled 970 vs 1080 ti for pan & zoom.

Had I known there was going to be this massive of an improvement in quality of life to pan & zoom I would have gladly updated to the 1080 TI a year ago when I first made this post and paid all the extra.

Things went from slow and lagy at best and crippling slow frequently to barely noticeable at all even on my most complex works. I can now pan and zoom as fast as my hands and fingers can move on works that use to slow to a crippling crawl if I tried to move faster than a snails pace.

[firstdefence]

Would be interesting to see what the GPU-Z readings are as a comparison.

[RPC]

In hindsight I really wished I would have made a video since it really has been an amazing change that I wasn't expected at all. But since I wasn't expecting it, it caught me me off guard and I had already pre-sold GTX 970 right before getting the 1080 TI so It went straight out the door the moment it was pulled from the system.

[RPC]

Looking at things I'd wager it's really the OpenCL support.

970 GTX didn't have OpenCL and the older and vastly lower powered AMD cards I had tried earlier in the thread had OpenCL support which was apparently enough to make them performance just as good as the 970 GTX without it.  So now that I have a high end card with OpenCL support that's probably why I saw the huge leap.

[firstdefence]

11 minutes ago, RPC said:

Looking at things I'd wager it's really the OpenCL support.

Agreed, that jumped out at me when I saw the screenshot, glad its all sorted and maybe others will find this a good reference post.