Choppy performance Issues with PC Photo

[FolioGraphic]

I just bought the PC version based on my usage experience with the Mac version of Affinity Photo.

I'm experiencing a number of issues starting with the application slowing down a high end PC where the mouse pointer is jumping all over the place when in the app and not elsewhere.

PC Specs:
i5-9600K 3.7GHz
16GB ram
RTX 2080

This computer has never experienced any lag or slowdown like this even when editing video. Additionally adjustment filters like denoise will show a preview of the adjustment and then revert, the desired effect never actually stays. I'm having trouble using this software in exactly the same way I have on my much less powerful Mac mini and feel like I need a refund. I'd be happy to video the problems and post them here or send them somewhere.

[DigitalVisuals]

I work also with a i5- 4570  CPU 3.2 GHz  Ram 16 Gb and a Nvidia 1050 Ti
but PS and AP are working very smooth and that I have both active.

[Steps]

My specs are also below yours and PSE & Affinity Photo both run blazingly fast.

I would check out if the components of your computer work good together.

Memtest86 for memory, Prime95 for CPU and 3DMark for graphics are three good tools to stress test your PC.

If you have problems in your setup like a bad Power Supply Unit you will quickly find out this way.

Sometimes it's easy to fix. For example if memory timings not fit to your CPU. That can be adjusted in BIOS.

[hifred]

40 minutes ago, Steps said:

Sometimes it's easy to fix.

No this slowness is actually an often reported issue - the Windows version doesn't even use hardware acceleration so far - that's the reason for a lot of visible performance bottlenecks - and the user can't do anything about it. I run a stronger machine than mentioned in the first post and I too do consider Affinity Photo very slow, it is likely the slowest performing program I have on disk. There's no reason to to run all sorts of tests, because everything else works very well.

I7 6850K, GTX 1070, 32 GB RAM

 

[Steps]

15 minutes ago, hifred said:

 I do consider Affinity Photo very low, it is likely the lowest perforing program I have on disk.

Objection!

It's on my machine on par with Photoshop Elements 12 which is also very quick.

And I recently compared Affinity Publisher to it's contenders and found it to be the blanzingly fast.

I have a very smooth experience with the Affinity products.

The problems mentioned by the OP usually come up if something else is wrong.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1809). Intel Core i5-4670K @ 3.40GHz, 16 GB memory, NVidia GTX 780

And regarding "everything else" I found that this is not a really good data point because different programs use resources differently. That's why stress tests got invented to cover a broad spectrum of possible problems.

[hifred]

8 minutes ago, Steps said:

It's on my machine on par with Photoshop Elements 12 which is also very quick. 

And I recently compared Affinity Publisher to it's contenders and found it to be the blanzingly fast

That is very good for you, but I am afraid that doesn't help me :o).

If you look around in the forum you will find quite a few posts with files which perform sluggishly or need insanely long to export, very likely also on your machine :o).

[Steps]

1 minute ago, hifred said:

If you look around in the forum you will find quite a few posts with files which perform sluggishly or need insanely long to export, very likely also on your machine :o).

That's just guesswork.

The OP did not attach a file to compare.

I reported the experiences I had with my use cases of photo retouching. 

Of course there is a chance of some layer/ feature combination that slows down the product. But I would see thst more as a bug.

If you're interested attach a file that is very slow on your PC and I report you my experience with that back.

[hifred]

Here's a thread where someone posted a sample-file.
I'd be impressed when your machine switched over to to Tone Mapping within reasonable time.
 

29 minutes ago, Steps said:

If you're interested attach a file that is very slow on your PC and I report you my experience with that back.

What I want to do regularly doesn't currently work in APhoto – I want to have 20 or more files with embedded RAWs open – what causes no hickups in Photoshop (CS6).

When testing Aphoto I encounter a lot of latency, redraw issues, effects visibly rendering one chunk of the image after the other, many tools which need a noticeable
delay before they start doing something, Layer and Mask thumbnails not refreshing in realtime. Until recently also the Crop tool was extremely slow and could even get stuck and overtaken by the cursor– but it has been improved in the 1.7 Beta.

[hifred]

Just to be clear: I have no intentions to bash Affinity Photo – I would not spend my time with feedback if I would not see potential. 
I believe we all should accept that there's still quite a few shortcomings in this still young suite of programs – even it works nicely on your end. What I usually see when such complaints come up is that fellow users suggest labour intense tests (check how many fonts you have installed / use a fonts manager,  download and run an array of diagnosis software...).

While it's sure meant as a help, such tipps often imply that the user has used / set up things wrongly or that something is fundamentally broken with their hardware (and they only haven't realized yet). Usually however,  these people already have a perfectly valid benchmark: Exactly the same thing works a lot smoother, with comparable software on the same hardware – otherwise they would not speak up.

[Steps]

1 hour ago, hifred said:

Just to be clear: I have no intentions to bash Affinity Photo – I would not spend my time with feedback if I would not see potential.

Same is absolutely true for me!

1 hour ago, hifred said:

I believe we all should accept that there's still quite a few shortcomings in this still young suite of programs

Yes, there are some. And I think it's important to point them out to help.

I see the shortcomings in usability, not in performance issues.

1 hour ago, hifred said:

While it's sure meant as a help, such tipps often imply that the user has used / set up things wrongly or that something is fundamentally broken with their hardware (and they only haven't realized yet)

I really don't see why you are so offended by this. Wow...

But yes, I have some experience in that field and also encountered similar problems myself. In my cases in the past it was once related to a PSU that did not put out enough power in some circumstances and another thing was a problem with memory timings that only occured under specific conditions. Stress tests help to figure those problems out.

1 hour ago, hifred said:

Usually however,  these people already have a perfectly valid benchmark: Exactly the same thing works a lot smoother, with comparable software on the same hardware – otherwise they would not speak up.

Here I still disagree with you. This is a false conclusion.

Different tools are implemented in different ways and utilize the hardware differently.

All I wanted to suggest is that it's worth checking the hardware. And the tests I mentioned can all performed in less an hour.

After that you have new data points. You can say "hey people, my PC is prime95-stable and memory memchecked".

More often than not good hardware components may not work nicely together because of misfits in the compilation.
What do you think why there are long lists of compatible memory and mainboards based on tests (not on specs)?

On a MAC you don't have to care for that because you get already perfectly compatible hardware out of the box.
If you buy a Windows PC someone assembled in in a certain way and there is a lot of potential for problems.

And as you mentioned problems I would suggest you too to just do a quick test of your hardware.
The problems the OP describes should not be normal for the Windows build. Of course not.

[hifred]

55 minutes ago, Steps said:

I really don't see why you are so offended by this. Wow...

No emotions whatsoever involved here – I wonder what makes you assume that.
I merely want to point out that typical reactions to critical feedback I see in this forum send back  action to the thread opener and also tend to seek own responsability for encountered malfunctions. That appears odd to me, as anyone who reads this forum semi-regularly will encounter valid samples of missing performance-optimization.

55 minutes ago, Steps said:

Here I still disagree with you. This is a false conclusion. Different tools are implemented in different ways and utilize the hardware differently. All I wanted to suggest is that it's worth checking the hardware. And the tests I mentioned can all performed in less an hour.

No, sorry. I read that you work in software development – you will certainly have hardware skills and knowledge I don't have, I respect that.
But when I know that a piece of software is new and that it hardly uses the Graphics Card at all (on Windows) and when I additionally see effects which typically occur when Graphics Accelleration is turned off... When I also know that I have have a well maintained machine with a large enough PSU, which works flawlessly with a wide array of other software (e.g. large CAD assemblies and single files with several GB size) and with render-engines which tax CPU and GPU at full load over hours, you will have to forgive me that I don't fire up Prime needlessly.

[FolioGraphic]

So, quite the debate.

I had originally switched from Windows to MacOS over a decade ago because windows and it's software were unreliable and lost work cost me a great deal of time and money as a graphic designer back then. Moving to MacOS and the same software in the Mac version solved every problem I ever had with crashes and lost work.

Now that I've been using Windows 10 without issue for a couple of years I've decided to try moving my workflow back over because Mac "Just Works" is less and less true these days now that Apple has changed focus from intuitive reliability to gimicky feature competition with Android and Samsung etc.

I've been building PCs for gaming for years and am aware of most (Not an expert who knows everything by far) issues like those mentioned above but this system is as stable as any I've seen and it rips through anything I've put up against it without issues until now. Admittedly I have been adding more and more software to the machine as I've been moving my workflow over but I've checked every background application and shut everything down except Affinity Photo without seeing the problem go away. Clean resets of the application and operating system made no difference.

On other systems the mouse jumping behavior was usually a result of background windows updates that needed installation clogging up the RAM or something else and when updates were completed the problems went away but there is no such thing happening on this system and RAM usage is well below 40% at the worst of times. All 6 cores peak quickly and recover when performing the denoise filter but it is not a process that's causing the mouse judder/lag. as it will occur by just mousing over a menu item, persist for 4 seconds and then recover, then reoccur when selecting a tool etc, etc,... Very annoying.

Switching to Affinity from Adobe (Money Grab inc.) was one of the best things I've ever done and I love the way Affinity works for the most part. But this makes working with it almost unbearable.

That's the back story I didn't include with my OP.

I am open to suggestions, no matter how simple. But be aware that in most cases when I call for help, after spending an hour doing everything I've already done again for the sake of the help desk checklist my issues usually get escalated to software engineers for solutions. I don't just jump on a forum or call a help desk until I've tried everything I know how to do already.

[Steps]

35 minutes ago, hifred said:

with a large enough PSU

In one of my cases the PSU was of course large enough, but it was one of those awful BeQuiet PSUs.

I changed it in the first place, but problems stayed. I suspected something else then. Later I learned that the whole series had a design problem. The matter was that the output was not stable enough.

Many apps did not care, others resulted in stutterting and some even in blue screens. Total depending on the app.

I switched to Seasonic PSUs after that and never encountered PSU related problems again. 

Just as one example.

43 minutes ago, hifred said:

with render-engines which tax CPU and GPU at full load over hours, you will have to forgive me that I don't fire up Prime needlessly.

It's okay then, I accept it as a stress test.

I cannot explain why Affinity does perform so badly on your machine. 

On my side PaintShop Pro 2019 performs very bad. Can you confirm bad performance here also?

[Steps]

1 hour ago, FolioGraphic said:

I've been building PCs for gaming for years and am aware of most (Not an expert who knows everything by far) issues like those mentioned above but this system is as stable as any I've seen and it rips through anything I've put up against it without issues until now.

So you did all the tests I mentioned above with good results?

I build also my PCs and did those as a standard  procedure to confirm my compilation. And I repeat after changing hardware. I want to keep my setup primestable.

If you order a custom setup build at Mindfactory for example they do those same tests.

And it is not needless as @hifred said. It's a good practice of Quality assurance.

If you did all that already please state next time the condition of your computer.

[Steps]

57 minutes ago, hifred said:

 also tend to seek own responsability for encountered malfunctions.

Forgive me, but if you build your own PC you are indeed responsible. So, yes.

I would not have rsponded that way to a Mac User as I know that the setups are pre made and unlikely to have such compatbility problems. Apple takes care and is responsible for that.

[hifred]

38 minutes ago, Steps said:

I cannot explain why Affinity does perform so badly on your machine. 

Average performance is not crazy bad. It is just not as  fast and snappy as I do expect from my Photoshop background. I guess what users perceive as fast enough differs greatly. Other workflows are indeed impossible right now: Having 20+ RAWs open was not only crazy system taxing, it would also take about 10 minutes to only open them (while it takes practically no time to open them all into ACR (Photoshops RAW workspace) and max 20 seconds to bring them all into Photoshop CS6).
 

38 minutes ago, Steps said:

On my side PaintShop Pro 2019 performs very bad. Can you confirm bad performance here also?

No idea, I've never used PaintShop Pro.

[hifred]

1 hour ago, Steps said:

Forgive me, but if you build your own PC you are indeed responsible.

I do agree that users on custom built PCs have a certain responsability (mine was also assembled for me). That being said: It sure required an exquisite misfit of parts to make a machine with high performance parts perform worse than a stock Laptop for a few bucks which meets the minimum specs – remember misbehaving just in Affinity – and nowhere else. It's also pretty safe to say that the majority of windows-customers use readily configured machines. This all melts down hardware influence considerably, in my book.

Just have a look at this little gif (I linked it as it would be too distracting to look at while reading). It happens to be Publisher I opened today as people were raving about the latest version. The first thing I see when drawing a rectangle is graphics errors, likely due to missing Hardware Acceleration.

 

 

[Steps]

2 hours ago, hifred said:

That appears odd to me, as anyone who reads this forum semi-regularly will encounter valid samples of missing performance-optimization.

I did, of course. But not on that level described here. That's surprising.

I see memory problems with Publisher when you work on a real world sized project and not on small samples. I saw problems handling images and also exporting a long document as PDF. But you may already knew I reported all these.

 

 

 

[Steps]

29 minutes ago, hifred said:

Just have a look at this little gif (I linked it as it would be too distracting to look at while reading). It happens to be Publisher I opened today as people were raving about the latest version. The first thing I see when drawing a rectangle is graphics errors, likely due to missing Hardware Acceleration.

I'm not all to certain if I understand you correctly because the GIF also is somehow sluggish.

But you seem to focus on the short graphics errors. Yes, they are definitely there. Confirmed.

But they influence in no way a fluid expierence using the app. It does not feel sluggish at all.

Here is a video taken at real time (60 fps):

This is the key frame at second 12.500 that shows a grapic error:

So this annoys you, right? Or is the user experience on par with this stuttering your GIF has?
I'm not sure if you took the GIF at a lower FPS as your screen. So this would be distracting.

If I open my photo book project with 200+ linked image files yes, the app gets sluggish and crashes.
But until that point the experience is very good.

To conclude on this I would say I do not miss the hardware acceleration because I can live with short redrawing issues like this, but I need Serif to optimize the memory handling with lots of images as for now you can't do a proper sized photo book with Publisher and keep the linked images. As said before I had to rasterize everything to keep memory low and Publisher therefore responsive and relieable.

 

[Steps]

38 minutes ago, hifred said:

likely due to missing Hardware Acceleration.

Are you sure this is true? Did you check your Renderer settings?

I tried the WARP setting for a moment and get a considerable worse responsiveness.

So I'm not that sure it really has no hardware acceleration. Can you link a prove for that?

[Steps]

@FolioGraphic Maybe it's time that you show us a video of your experience and maybe you provide a sample file. I start to doubt that we have the same definition of what we consider a problem.

[hifred]

Your screen rendering looks better. That gif is obviously at just 15 frames but it shows those missing chunks (they are indeed as large as in your screenshot) and how the software can't keep up with redrawing. And yes, I don't want to look at such defects, already on the most trivial vector entity. Even Xara with a 35 years old Assembler code base does this (a lot) better. And as stated – I see these issues in every tool which needs to refresh the screen quickly.

My graphics-settings are fine and I have considerably better card than you – but it seems to sit idle :o)

26 minutes ago, Steps said:

So I'm not that sure it really has no hardware acceleration. Can you link a prove for that?

That's broadly known and got posted numerous times. Here's one (inofficial) statement I found – the thread is older but the issue is still open. Others might be able to provide an official statement.

 

[Steps]

16 minutes ago, hifred said:

Your screen rendering looks better. That gif is obviously at just 15 frames

Excuse me? 

Tell me how I should know if you recorded at 15 fps or if this is exactly the performance you experience? You made no mention to that. 

16 minutes ago, hifred said:

I have considerably better card than you – but it seems to sit idle.

Yes, and the OP has an considerably better card than you.

But as said before my experience is seemingly better.

I will install a monitor tool later on to check how it is used.

[v_kyr]

6 minutes ago, hifred said:

Even Xara with a 35 years old Assembler code base does this (a lot) better. 

Well due to that (probably hand crafted Assembler code) Xara is a fast performer, since it's natively programmed here. The Affinity products insted may (AFAIK) use managed .Net code for most tasks and the UI, which in turn gains a difference in speed. Even unmanaged/managed C/C++ code gains a difference in speed so it's no surprise here. Put to that possibly slower GC memory handling etc.

[hifred]

28 minutes ago, Steps said:

Tell mehow I should know if you recorded at 15 fps or if this is exactly the performance you experience? You made no mention to that. 

Well, I can move the box-handles at realtime, this appears a bit more edgy in the gif at 15 frames. The redraw defects are represented quite realistically.