APH is slow - Improvement by Graphics or Memory?

[Sempervivum]

Hi there,

Affinity Photo is fairly slow on my current computer - e. g. there is a significant lag when changing a setting in an adjustment layer.

Which compoments of the hardware affect Affinity's performance? Is it supported by the graphics device and can I expect an improvement when buying a more powerful one? Currently there is onboard graphis AMD Radeon HD 8570D.

Or is upgrading the memory more promising? Currently there are 8GB.

My OS is Win 7 Home Premium. System and Software on SSD.

Best regards - Ulrich

[IanSG]

AP doesn't use the GPU much (yet?) so you'll get more benefits from adding memory.

[Pšenda]

More memory will never hurt, but 8GB is also quite enough. Of course, much depends on how you handle large photos and how difficult you make with them. So look at memory usage during typical editing, if it's already at its peak. In my opinion, however, the biggest brake is the CPU performance.

[Chris26]

5 hours ago, Sempervivum said:

there is a significant lag when changing a setting in an adjustment layer.

For me this is a dead give-away.  Either processing speed can not cope because the file size of that image is too big now, and, take a look at clearing up clutter, try to make sure that the computer is running only Affinity and not other background processes, maybe apps?  I have had this happen to me on the mac and all I do is drop the amount of re-dos that have been allotted to the software (that is remembering History as you edit) and reduce the amount of re-draws necessary when zooming and so on, (I do not know if the latter is available in Af Photo) but the former is, I also save the file with all layers intact and then do a save-as, continue editing  this new SAVE-AS file AFTER I have flattened what I know I probably no longer need to edit, that always works reduces load on the processor and functions where the software is making more page outs than page ins.. (page outs should always be less than page ins when it comes to memory swapping, this is the best indicator of computer performance when it comes to resource intensive applications).  I have only  4 gb on win 10 and still operates very well.  So memory is not an issue with you I believe. 

[Sempervivum]

Hallo and thanks for the replies and advice so far.

In the meantime I looked at the memory usage and when several photos are open it's close to it's limit. Therefore I consider upgrading to 16GB.

Quote

the biggest brake is the CPU performance.

This is an additional aspect and I consider upgrading to a more powerful CPU. Does AP benefit from Multicore CPUs? Currently there is AMD A8-6600K which has 4 Cores AFAIK. Can I expect that upgrading to a AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8× 3700 MHz would increase the performance significantly?

Best regards - Ulrich

[v_kyr]

45 minutes ago, Sempervivum said:

Does AP benefit from Multicore CPUs?

Yes it's said to do so.

46 minutes ago, Sempervivum said:

Can I expect that upgrading to a AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8× 3700 MHz would increase the performance significantly?

Usually it should, beside multiple CPU cores having enough RAM and mass storage I/O (SSDs etc.) is also an aspect to fasten a system on every computer.