REALLY SLOW - affinity designer for mac

[davidlower8]

Hey,

Is anyone else experiencing really slow, buggy performance from affinity designer on mac (desktop). Since the update to 1.7 the app is either really struggling or is using so much of my machine's resources. This was never a problem before. I just up and went, didn't matter how many files I had open or their sizes. Now I can't even have two open. What ends up happening is the machine slows down to a point the app simply crashes or I have to restart my mac. Like I say this was never a problem before so I am very skeptical to blame my machine.

For example this morning in the space of just 1 hour I have had to force quit the app 3 times. Every day I am having to force quit and/or restart my computer. With the 'forced pixel alignment' issue, this app is regretably becoming unusuable, which breaks my heart because I love these products.

[Tezza2]

My machine is exactly as you describrd yours now. Ever since the upgrade I have had a lot of problems with it. Slow and very slow, high memory use and a couple of times my mac has hung up and I had to reboot. Deffinately the upgrade.

[Morten_Hjort]

Disable the "Enable Metal compute acceleration". That including using OpenGL fixed it for me. There are HUGE changes in performance depending on the settings, but Serif haven't been very vocal about it.

[Chris B]

Disabling 'Metal compute' from Preferences > Performance may be the solution. Alternatively, if it isn't enabled—try enabling it.

Metal compute will heavily depend on your type of GPU so try experimenting with the setting to see what works best. 

[davidlower8]

Thank you very much for those tips @Morten_Hjort and @Chris B. I will do that and see how it goes. Should I turn off openGraph. What does that do exactly and the other 3 settings there? Metal compute was on by default so I have turned it off since performance has been shoddy. It's great that this has boiled down to a simple setting. Thanks

[Chris B]

29 minutes ago, davidlower8 said:

What does that do exactly and the other 3 settings there?

They are just different renderers. Software uses your CPU and is slower whereas OpenGL and Metal will use a discrete card. The Display setting is used to render what is drawn on the screen. Metal compute (in Designer) is used for brush performance.

Try and use Metal instead of OpenGL unless you are experiencing performance issues but keep Metal compute off. 

[davidlower8]

@Chris B Ok so have openGraph on but metal off. I was having issues and metal was 'on' so should I assume to now keep it off? Or can I flip it with metal on and openGraph off?

[Chris B]

Oh I thought you meant issues with Metal compute on. It sounds like you need to keep Metal compute off but try experimenting with OpenGL and Metal (Display) to see which works for your setup. 

[davidlower8]

Ok it has been a week since this post and I believe this solution has indeed fixed the problem. Thank you all for your input.

[justmessingaround]

On 7/19/2019 at 1:51 PM, Morten_Hjort said:

Disable the "Enable Metal compute acceleration". That including using OpenGL fixed it for me. There are HUGE changes in performance depending on the settings, but Serif haven't been very vocal about it.

My hero. My gawd it was so so so slow, couldn't zoom with a second delay.