Any other Windows user feeling slightly ignored after Affinity Live presentation??

[emmrecs01]

Let me first say that it was a real privilege to watch the Affinity Live presentation last night and to witness the obvious enthusiasm and vision of Serif in creating and marketing such a comprehensive suite of interactive products.  I own all three and am delighted with them, though am far from being a power-user.

However, one thing struck me quite forcibly last night: all the demonstrations in the presentation were running on either Mac or iPad.  There was considerable time spent extolling the obvious benefits of e.g. using Metal to improve graphics speed and performance. 

I think I heard the word "Windows" once.  It would have been very reassuring to be told that similar improvements in performance were also coming to Windows, or did I miss something???

I should add that I am also delighted that Affinity products are truly cross-platform, even though I don't own a Mac or an iPad, but it would be "helpful" to learn that we Windows users are not being forgotten in the striving to create a top-notch graphics/publishing/photo suite. 

Jeff

[Mithferion]

Hardware acceleration is planned for the Windows version, as far as I know, but it's a more complicated task since the Hardware configurations are thousands compared to the Mac world.

Best regards!

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, Mithferion said:

Hardware configurations are thousands compared to the Mac world.

I think you are under by at least an order of magnitude.

[- S -]

3 hours ago, emmrecs01 said:

Let me first say that it was a real privilege to watch the Affinity Live presentation last night and to witness the obvious enthusiasm and vision of Serif in creating and marketing such a comprehensive suite of interactive products.  I own all three and am delighted with them, though am far from being a power-user.

However, one thing struck me quite forcibly last night: all the demonstrations in the presentation were running on either Mac or iPad.  There was considerable time spent extolling the obvious benefits of e.g. using Metal to improve graphics speed and performance. 

I think I heard the word "Windows" once.  It would have been very reassuring to be told that similar improvements in performance were also coming to Windows, or did I miss something???

I should add that I am also delighted that Affinity products are truly cross-platform, even though I don't own a Mac or an iPad, but it would be "helpful" to learn that we Windows users are not being forgotten in the striving to create a top-notch graphics/publishing/photo suite. 

I thought the same.  When watching Microsoft videos, I see them use Macs, IOS devices, Android devices, Linux, Chrome, Alexa.  To me this makes sense; if you're providing a product or service that uses those platforms, why wouldn't you talk about them and include them in the presentations.

With the Metal segment, as far as I'm aware Metal is just a graphics API like DirectX 12 or Vulkan.  So I don't understand why they wouldn't include a comment that they're also currently working on off-loading more to the GPU in Windows too—but that it's going to take longer to implement due to the larger variation of devices/GPUs/drivers that they need to consider.  It seemed a bit odd to completely ignore a large chunk of their user base throughout the keynote as if they didn't exist.

[gabriel_komorov]

3 hours ago, Mithferion said:

Hardware configurations are thousands compared to the Mac world.

Bullshit excuse. If this was the case then most games would be iOS exclusive, meanwhile Windows is where gaming lives, ant it doesn't stop game devs from taking full advantage of GPUs

[Mithferion]

1 hour ago, gabriel_komorov said:

Bullshit excuse. If this was the case then most games would be iOS exclusive, meanwhile Windows is where gaming lives, ant it doesn't stop game devs from taking full advantage of GPUs

And not all games run the same way in all of the Hardware combinations.

Also, and mor eimportantly: I said that it's a more complicated task, not that such fact is preventing anything. We don't even know if they started the development to support Hardware acceleration.

Best regards!

[manuG]

On 6/20/2019 at 5:20 PM, Mithferion said:

Hardware acceleration is planned for the Windows version, as far as I know, but it's a more complicated task since the Hardware configurations are thousands compared to the Mac world.

Best regards!

That is very misleading. Mac runs on the same X86 / AMD64 architecture as Windows these days, Mac only featuring Radeon GPUs while Windows can have both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. On Windows there's fleshed out and well documented APIs, e.g. CUDA that have been around for almost a decade now. I felt exactly the same as OP after seeing the video this morning. For a while now Serif seems to focus on the shrinking Apple-market (while most creatives these days are feed up by ever-growing prices with decreased specs from that company) - not sure why that is. I said it in another topic and I repeat again: I'd be more than happy to pay more to get AP / AD stable and well performing on Windows, I need it in my daily work, as of now it's mostly in my way and has been replaced partly by other software. This launch is a big disappointment to me, some performance issues are even worse than before and I doubt the answers I get here: "cannot reproduce" - sure, right.

[InfoCentral]

On 6/20/2019 at 10:36 AM, - S - said:

I thought the same.  When watching Microsoft videos, I see them use Macs, IOS devices, Android devices, Linux, Chrome, Alexa.  To me this makes sense; if you're providing a product or service that uses those platforms, why wouldn't you talk about them and include them in the presentations. It seemed a bit odd to completely ignore a large chunk of their user base throughout the keynote as if they didn't exist.

I couldn't agree more.  I also don't think they will ever drop Windows even if their focus is primary on Apple products. The reason being that it is a cash cow.  I'm not a gambling man but if this was a horse race and using OS market share as the handicap I would bet that the Windows versions are bringing in more money than all the Apple versions put together.

[Kimbo]

I fully accept that a large number of professional designers are working on Apple machines using Adobe products. It has been that way for a long time. I believe that Serif from a marketing perspective alone has not put all that effort into developing windows apps, to quit anytime soon. Adobe is pricing slowly pricing itself out of the market and programs such as the Affinity suite or "unholy trinity" as I like to call them, have made a high end product available to everyone regardless of using windows or mac.

I feel the presentation was about the product, not the machine it gets used on.

Now let's talk Linux, cause lets face it, if these programs were available on Linux, that is where you would find me.

 

[Patrick Connor]

Presenting for 30 minutes live takes a lot of guts and to criticize the lack of hardware used is in my opinion unfair. This was a live event broadcast worldwide by the small creative team in  a company of less than 100 people. To add another change of hardware into that presentation might have broken the flow. It doesn't in anyway represent the efforts to improve all the users experience with the software. It was just a presentation, not a report on the programming undertaken.

However, you have hit upon a fair point about how important metal is to Mac performance. It's not something we control, but it's incredibly useful as a tool.

If you look at this thread the difficulty implementing Windows equivalents are discussed in detail by the Windows project lead. To imply that we have said nothing in this subject is in my opinion unfair. We are working hard on this.

[Patrick Connor]

4 minutes ago, Kimbo said:

I feel the presentation was about the product, not the machine it gets used on

THIS ^

[InfoCentral]

12 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Presenting for 30 minutes live takes a lot of guts and to criticize the lack of hardware used is in my opinion unfair.

I don't think it was the platform used but the platform that wasn't mentioned that is of concern.