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If apple have made it possible for us to achieve better results , what should we do? The same amount of effort are going into both and one is giving better results because of the Mac ecosystem. Complain to Microsoft as we want everything to be the best. Why would you assume anything else? Our answers are honest and open. 

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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7 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

If apple have made it possible for us to achieve better results , what should we do? The same amount of effort are going into both and one is giving better results because of the Mac ecosystem. Complain to Microsoft as we want everything to be the best. Why would you assume anything else? Our answers are honest and open. 

It's OK Patrick, all is well. 

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If OpenCL and DirectCompute are non starters, would the option of only supporting CUDA be on the table or are you keen to avoid fragmenting performance between graphics cards?

I might be wrong, but I think Adobe started out with only Nvidia support.

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Always thought "Microsofts C++ AMP" should offer to address a better parallel execution model here. - How did the long time former Serif Windows software handled this, or didn't that supported GPU code based executions?

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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52 minutes ago, Merde said:

Strange, it is MUCH more smooth on my not so beefed-up system [i7-4770, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1660 Ti, SATA SSD etc] with 16 Mpix image!

Show us your performance preferences, maybe you have selected WARP renderer?

image.png.11c923ed69055a7d9a926e2ce373f75a.png

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34 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

If apple have made it possible for us to achieve better results , what should we do? The same amount of effort are going into both and one is giving better results because of the Mac ecosystem. Complain to Microsoft as we want everything to be the best. Why would you assume anything else? Our answers are honest and open. 

Sure, but there are still valid options on the table..

On the other hand, what are Affinity suggesting we users do then? Drop our $2-4000 Windows PCs and buy a $5000 MAC because there are no other rendering engine that Affinity want to use? I'd like that, but I ain't got any $5000 for a MAC.. It's kinda cheaper to just use another program then, yet I stick with this syrup to save some bucks from subscriptions.

I don't think OpenCL is going anywhere soon. Too many applications depending on it, and I think even Skylum use OpenCL in their new apps as-well, but thats my 5 cents.

I hope you manage to find a solution because it is not a good experience so far. I really mean it when I say rendering a 4k video and playing Battlefield 4 is a more fluid experience than having only Affinity Photo open and a 400px image..

 

Best Regards 

Aleksander

 

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8 minutes ago, atefoto said:

Then I find it strange that PhaseOne still improves upon the OpenCL engine. After v12 we notice quite a big speed improvement, same OpenCL as before, but different coding of course.

As Mark said, they're still "researching it".

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Related to OpenCL, the last I heard was, that in the future, OpenCL should be part of Vulkan as OpenCL-V in order to gain even wider support. Recently, OpenCL Next was announced for 2019 with some new information (see for example here).

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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3 minutes ago, atefoto said:

I hope you manage to find a solution because it is not a good experience so far. I really mean it when I say rendering a 4k video and playing Battlefield 4 is a more fluid experience than having only Affinity Photo open and a 400px image..

Or at least be a bit more honest in their marketing material: "Affinity 1.7 for Mac and 1.7lite for Windows now available". Or "1.7 kind of edition". 

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3 minutes ago, Novak said:

Or at least be a bit more honest in their marketing material: "Affinity 1.7 for Mac and 1.7lite for Windows now available". Or "1.7 kind of edition". 

I wouldn't be this harsh then, but I'm not sure if it is worthy the comparison of what they show in the Keynote. The keynote demo was too amazing for me to go back and open this Windows app, kinda frustrating when you regularly work with very big images or many layers.

I'll give them a clap for making RAW edit and HDR editor better, a lot more fluid, but not nearly fluid compared to anything else.

Okay then, I'll stop sobbing about Winblows PCs and their issues with MAC Native apps. :P

Good luck and we cheer for you DEVs.

I'm out. Peace.

Aleksander

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35 minutes ago, atefoto said:

I wouldn't be this harsh then, but I'm not sure if it is worthy the comparison of what they show in the Keynote. The keynote demo was too amazing for me to go back and open this Windows app, kinda frustrating when you regularly work with very big images or many layers.

I'll give them a clap for making RAW edit and HDR editor better, a lot more fluid, but not nearly fluid compared to anything else.

Okay then, I'll stop sobbing about Winblows PCs and their issues with MAC Native apps. :P

Good luck and we cheer for you DEVs.

I'm out. Peace.

Aleksander

I have CaptureOne and I dont' find it that smooth on the Mac. It's fast and does a great job but I don't find it near as smooth. Adobe products certainly aren't that smooth even with video acceleration turned on - at least not like Affinity. Even the 2015 MacBook Air is smooth in Affinity so it does not have to be an expensive or new machine. I even have it on a 2009 iMac that does not have any acceleration for Metal and my one employee likes it a lot better than Indesign.

Your system looks great and is better than pretty much anything that people are running it on here. Now I do wonder if maybe there is a setting in your video card drivers that is causing the issues by not having 2D acceleration turned on.. Can you assign app refresh rates? Part of the issue looks like refresh is not high enough, like playing a game on a bad screen or maybe worse. I Have windows 7. If I can get Affinity to let me use one of my keys for Windows, I'll see what it does.

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13 minutes ago, Bryce said:

I have CaptureOne and I dont' find it that smooth on the Mac. It's fast and does a great job but I don't find it near as smooth. Adobe products certainly aren't that smooth even with video acceleration turned on - at least not like Affinity. Even the 2015 MacBook Air is smooth in Affinity so it does not have to be an expensive or new machine. I even have it on a 2009 iMac that does not have any acceleration for Metal and my one employee likes it a lot better than Indesign.

Your system looks great and is better than pretty much anything that people are running it on here. Now I do wonder if maybe there is a setting in your video card drivers that is causing the issues by not having 2D acceleration turned on.. Can you assign app refresh rates? Part of the issue looks like refresh is not high enough, like playing a game on a bad screen or maybe worse. I Have windows 7. If I can get Affinity to let me use one of my keys for Windows, I'll see what it does.

CaptureOne is the fastest app I got except for Photo Mechanic. I can have 10 layers with luminosity masking, curves, sharpening, etc, and still no slow-dows.

""Now I do wonder if maybe there is a setting in your video card drivers that is causing the issues by not having 2D acceleration turned on.""
Then I would have problems in the 10+ other editing apps I own, wouldnt I? But no, only in the 3 apps of Affinity.


""Can you assign app refresh rates? Part of the issue looks like refresh is not high enough, like playing a game on a bad screen or maybe worse.""
Yes, 60hz on my BenQ SW2700PT QHD 99.6% AdobeRGB monitor.

I don't believe for a second that this have anything with a setting or misconfiguration. All nVidia settings are default and Affinity is just as slow before and after reinstall of Operating system. The PC is built by professionals.

I can edit 4k and 6k videos no problem while watching Netflix and run a game, and only then I'll notice CPU have to work.

It's no logic that Affinity Photo or Designer should be like this when it's the only open Window I got, and the picture is only 400px.

We are talking about I can do everything else in the world on the PC flawlessly, except have a great experience with the Affinity Apps, so for me it is quite obvious that its not a setting, its not bad this or bad that, it is simply not support for real hardware acceleration. My reasoning: CPU; never above 30% and GPU never above 15%.

Aleksander

 

 

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5 hours ago, BofG said:

Would there be any sense in only supporting GPU compute on newer systems?

I think you misunderstand.  Go back too far and the GPUs themselves (or their drivers) don't support compute at all.  On those new enough to do so, where Photo *does* allow it to be enabled, people are finding it is actually slower when using GPU compute than when it is turned off.  The hardware cannot keep up to the point that keeping the processing on the CPU is actually faster than using the GPU because of the requirements of a program like this.  It is not that GPU is not supported by the program, but using it on older GPU hardware (or possibly due to lower-quality drivers) results in slower performance instead of faster.

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There was at least one thread about Affinity performance issues specific to Threadripper, here. However, that was resolved as being an issue with G-sync and drivers, I think, so may not be relevant to @atefoto's performance issue.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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11 hours ago, Novak said:

I'm not being harsh, I'm being realistic....it's the reality that's harsh.

It may make Windows users feel a bit better to know that part of the harsh reality is on Macs, Metal compute acceleration is available only for GPU's that support it. Currently, that is limited to certain recent Radeon GPU's & the integrated Intel graphics GPU's built into some (but not all) recent Macs, plus (some?) iPads with Apple' proprietary A-series chips. Older Macs, like mine & millions of others, & I think even some recent or current models can't use Metal compute acceleration because they can't be outfitted with a compatible card. Even if they could, they could not take advantage of it because the interface to the card isn't fast enough.

Plus, as James Ritson explains beginning around the 4:00 mark in this video, even if the GPU is supported, if the GPU does not have enough onboard VRAM, using Metal compute acceleration can actually be slower than using software.

So personally, I think Ash was more than justified in devoting so much keynote time to this feature, even though for now only certain Apple products can support it. Windows support for compute acceleration will take longer & probably also be limited to certain high end hardware configurations, but you can't really blame Serif for that, anymore than I can blame them for not supporting Macs like mine.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

but you can't really blame Serif for that, anymore than I can blame them for not supporting Macs like mine.

Not blaming anyone, just saying that they shouldn't bare the same version number when the biggest feature of 1.7, hw acceleration is missing in windows version (and probably won't be included for a looonnnggg time) and that there should be a disclaimer regarding "fastest editing software" when people are having enormous slowdowns on their threadripper/gtx 1080ti systems. Let people know what they're buying and what to expect.

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Also, Metal is not new to 1.7. It was implemented last year or the year before and it was also very smooth in Designer. That was a big feature last year along with the iPad Designer version and how smooth it was. What they did implement was Metal 2 and additional metal acceleration.

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2 hours ago, Novak said:

Not blaming anyone, just saying that they shouldn't bare the same version number when the biggest feature of 1.7, hw acceleration is missing in windows version (and probably won't be included for a looonnnggg time) and that there should be a disclaimer regarding "fastest editing software" when people are having enormous slowdowns on their threadripper/gtx 1080ti systems. Let people know what they're buying and what to expect.

My main point was that hardware compute acceleration is currently only supported on certain Macs & iPads, so it is not the "biggest feature of 1.7" even for all Mac users, & even for those who can take advantage of it, there are caveats that can make it slower than software-only computation.

Sure, the keynote devoted a lot of time to Metal compute acceleration, but at least arguably the biggest new feature is StudioLink, & it works across all three supported platforms.

As for different version numbers, that seems a bit much, more likely to cause confusion than anything else.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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4 hours ago, Novak said:

Not blaming anyone, just saying that they shouldn't bare the same version number when the biggest feature of 1.7, hw acceleration is missing in windows version (and probably won't be included for a looonnnggg time) and that there should be a disclaimer regarding "fastest editing software" when people are having enormous slowdowns on their threadripper/gtx 1080ti systems. Let people know what they're buying and what to expect.

But the marketing and info about GPU acceleration have mentioned that it is a Mac only feature. Also, all other improvements that were done for 1.7 are shared across the board, so calling 1.7 anything else than 1.7 on Windows is honestly quite silly.

As for the people with top of the line hardware having performance issues,  that of course needs to be addressed, whatever is causing it. It doesn't seem normal when my former top of the line computer from 2013 is able to perform better than that.

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On 6/20/2019 at 12:13 AM, Patrick Connor said:

@Merde

Thanks for that. Can I suggest you read this and this . It's not straight forward and anyone in this thread who thinks it's being ignored is not aware how the Windows hardware eco-system makes this very tricky.

Ok, we get that Mac is the primary audience for Affinity, and that your development efforts SHOULD probably focus more on Mac...

However, making Windows the 'issue' of GPU acceleration support is dishonest or amazing ignorant.

Windows NT, since the WDM/WDDM technologies introduced in Vista and newer offer more GPU/Driver abstraction through several frameworks than any other OS technology. The irony of Apple's Metal, is they created it to be MORE LIKE the video technologies in Windows, that offer high performance with better hardware abstraction than OpenGL and OpenCL were capable of providing. 

Windows not only has frameworks like DirectX, but the entire Video stack is managed by the NT kernel, with GPU preemptive multitasking, GPU virtualization, GPU SMP technologies - technologies all controlled and managed by the OS. And since these are managed by Windows, it is a lot easier for developers, as software requires no knowledge, additional coding, or understanding of the technologies to gain use of them. 

Example - even the current versions of Affinity Photo/Designer are getting GPU acceleration features from Windows, unless the Serif developers are purposely circumventing the technology. The easy example is showing a thumbnail of a JPEG or decoding a JPEG using standard Windows APIs are GPU accelerated, and this is pure GP-GPU - and has nothing to do with compositing or rendering using the GPU.

In other words, Affinity should not ever be touching or calling GPU or GPU driver specific code or features on Windows. Not only is it not necessary, it breaks the abstraction and GPU agnostic model of Windows, making the development process harder with buggier implementations. 

This is also why the response about Windows and GPU diversity and GPU driver issues are what held back adding GPU acceleration sounds so crazy.


A software product like Affinity can implement features without regard to the hardware on Windows, an additionally the extra work that Apple's metal requires like managing VRAM and each GPU is completely automatic in Windows.

Even implementing multiple GPU support, like Affinity implements on the Mac, is no more than a using a single GPU context on Windows, and then Windows manages the GPUs, their specific hardware features/differences, threading between all available GPUs in the system, and even handles VRAM between the GPUs and the system by visualizing it to the software. (Affinity Photo wouldn't even have to worry if there was VRAM or enough VRAM or what GPU it was allocated on, as Windows automatically fills in any assumptions/agnostic gaps.)

Simply, these things are abstracted from software through the frameworks, drivers and platform technologies in Windows. They are NOT abstracted on OS X, even with Metal. 

Windows uses a very specific set of agnostic threading technologies for GPU acceleration, which is why GPGPU code has and is scattered throughout Windows itself and the major new frameworks that run on Windows.  If GPU diversity or GPU drivers were an issue, there wouldn't be so man GP-GPU and GPU acceleration features scattered throughout Windows 10, as everything would break.

GPU usage is not hard or fragile in Window.

The side note to this, is that the reason Metal exists, is because when Apple pushed all in on OpenCL - the GPU cooperative multitasking in OS X did not allow widespread use of OpenCL, as OS X and software would collide, limiting the use of OpenCL on OS X beyond specialized software.   Ironically, even with Metal, the same GPU yield/cooperative multi-tasking still exists, which still limits widespread CONCURRENT use of the technology. 

If what I am writing is 'really' new to Serif developers, I could provide a few code samples, that implement similar GPU shader and acceleration features like Affinity on OS X uses in less than 20 lines of code that can run in a UWP App on a Windows PC with any GPU, and it will also work on Windows PCs without a GPU. This same code will run on a Windows PC with 5 different brand/model GPUs, spanning several generations of GPU technologies, and utilize them all equally, without adding or modifying the code. 

I can also provide a similar bit of code in C or C++ to demonstrate how this works at a lower level with DirectX on Windows.

This isn't rocket science, there is no need to use CUDA or OpenCL on Windows.  With Windows and DirectX, you can even use new ML/AI features or full on DXR (ray tracing) features if you want a really fast denoiser for the Development persona.



In conclusion... Windows makes the GPU brand/mode/driver agnostic to software, so blaming the GPU/Driver variation/complexity in the PC world is just NOT TRUE.  (The only time the GPU matters is if the developer CHOOSES to use a GPU specific technology like CUDA, and even then, creating an agnostic fallback is really simple.)

So... 
We get that iPad and Macs are the primary market for Affinity, but don't create conspiratorial arguments or place the blame on Windows for the differences between Windows/Mac.

If Serif wants and needs to put the work into Metal and Macs, that is fine, just say so.

 

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