Performance on a 2009 Mac Pro with a RX560?

[Olivier St-Amand]

Hello, 

New here, and very intrigued by Affinity. Finally a serious alternative to Photoshop!

Quick question to begin. I've been playing with the trial (and watching the tutorials, great job on those!) and I'm loving it so far. The only thing that worries me, on my system (2009 MP with RX560 on 10.13.5), is the performance. It's rather slow. Much slower than Photoshop, especially the liquify persona. 

I've checked the performance preferences, but that didn't help. Although the OS and card are Metal capable, the Metal options are greyed out. I know my system is old, but given that I plan on keeping it until the 2019 (or 2020? gasp!) Mac Pro, performance is an important concern. 

Is it normal to get such slow performance on my old system?

 

Thanks

[firstdefence]

So are you using OpenGL?

 

[v_kyr]

10 hours ago, Olivier St-Amand said:

... Much slower than Photoshop, especially the liquify persona.

I use a pretty old iMac, there the Photoshop liquify filter is unusable due to how it reacts in terms of performance. It's slow as hell, reacts too lazily and runs after. The same version of the Photoshop liquify filter runs under an equally equipped old Win box much better and snappier in contrast. - On the Mac side the Affinity liquify persona runs much better and snappier for me than it's counterpart from PS.

Quote

... I know my system is old, but given that I plan on keeping it until the 2019 (or 2020? gasp!) Mac Pro, performance is an important concern. 

Is it normal to get such slow performance on my old system?

Depending on older CPUs with less cores, lower RAM sizes ... etc. probably yes.

[Olivier St-Amand]

3 hours ago, firstdefence said:

So are you using OpenGL?

 

I've tried all four settings with similarly slow results. Just to be sure: when they say changing that setting requires a restart, they mean an app restart, right? Not a full system restart?

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

I use a pretty old iMac, there the Photoshop liquify filter is unusable due to how it reacts in terms of performance. It's slow as hell, reacts too lazily and runs after. [...] On the Mac side the Affinity liquify persona runs much better and snappier for me than it's counterpart from PS.

I'm very surprised. For me it's the opposite. Are you using recent version of Photoshop? 

As far as old CPUs and RAM size, my CPU is old, but it's still a 4 cores / 8 threads 3.33 GHz Nehalem that runs fine with Photoshop. And my 16GB of ram could be more, but then again, all my apps run fine. 

Last question: is it normal that Affinity ignores my RX560? The option to use it is greyed out. 

[v_kyr]

2 minutes ago, Olivier St-Amand said:

'm very surprised. For me it's the opposite. Are you using recent version of Photoshop? 

No I use older PS and PSE ones.

3 minutes ago, Olivier St-Amand said:

As far as old CPUs and RAM size, my CPU is old, but it's still a 4 cores / 8 threads 3.33 GHz Nehalem that runs fine with Photoshop. And my 16GB of ram could be more, but then again, all my apps run fine.

The CPU and RAM should be OK (adequad enough) and usually not causing the performance problems here.

8 minutes ago, Olivier St-Amand said:

Last question: is it normal that Affinity ignores my RX560? The option to use it is greyed out.

It should be set on "OpenGL" if it doesn't support "Metal" there and if the Metal GPU-Acceleration compatibility is disabled.

And yes restart means just an App restart!

[Olivier St-Amand]

Thanks for the replies. 

I can select Metal in the drop down menu (with OpenGL and Software), but I can't click the "Hardware Acceleration: Enable Metal Compute Acceleration" check box. It says that Affinity couldn't detect a Metal compatible GPU. 

But the RX560 is Metal capable. As a proof: World of Warcraft now requires a Metal aware OS (10.13+) and a Metal capable GPU (which the RX560 is), and I can play WoW on my system. 

Sadly, this is pretty much a deal-breaker for me unless I can find a solution. 

[v_kyr]

According to this Mac & i article (here an english translation) metal under Mojave OS is supported by a MSI Gaming Radeon RX 560 and a Radeon PULSE RX 580 from Sapphire.

And MacRumors tells this, Apple Outlines Metal-Capable Cards

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You can check to see if your graphics card is compatible by holding down option while selecting Apple logo to access System Information. Under Graphics/Displays, if "Supported" is listed next to the Metal entry, the graphics card will work with macOS Mojave.

According to Apple, once a Metal-capable graphics card has been installed in a 2010 or 2012 Mac Pro, macOS Mojave can be downloaded and installed after turning off FileVault.

 

2 hours ago, Olivier St-Amand said:

I can select Metal in the drop down menu (with OpenGL and Software), but I can't click the "Hardware Acceleration: Enable Metal Compute Acceleration" check box. It says that Affinity couldn't detect a Metal compatible GPU. 

Don't know if there is a reused Mac OS Metal software detection service involved here for determining the GPU compatibility, or if it is some own Affinity GPU detection code portion. However one of the Affinity Mac Devs should be able to tell you for sure here.

[Olivier St-Amand]

Just did the check you recommended, and yes, it's recognized and supported with my RX560. 

 

Anyway I can contact the devs directly?

[v_kyr]

They usually monitor and do check the forum, but other than that you pobably can ask or file in a request after this theme in the Bugs on Mac forum section for your sureness.

[Olivier St-Amand]

Thanks. I created a thread there. Hopefully I'll be able to buy Affinity to finally replace Photoshop. :-)

[Olivier St-Amand]

Ok, a bit more info from the devs. The only metal cards that are supported are the ones in some MacBook Pro models. This means, sadly, that Affinity is unusable for me. Luckily for the company, I'm a special case!  :-)