Settings for Improved Performance?

[Mark Oehlschlager]

I'm running the latest 1.7.2 Affinity apps and have discovered that raster brush work can be painfully non-responsive. For example, using the recolor brush over a 300ppi image can take up to 60 seconds to begin to render, and even then the recoloring slowly materializes. Many complex DAUB brushes are not immediately responsive.

I'm running Mac OS X, High Sierra, 10.13.6, on a late 2012 iMac, 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5; 16 GB RAM; 512 MB VRAM (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M).

Is there a recommended performance setting in the application preferences that would resolve this?

[firstdefence]

What settings do you have in Preferences: Performance?

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

I'm running Mac OS X, High Sierra, 10.13.6, on a late 2012 iMac, 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5; 16 GB RAM; 512 MB VRAM (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M).

FWIW, I am running Affinity on exactly the same iMac model, except with only 8 GB of RAM. I do not ever see anything close to a 60 second delay, even when painting with complex brushes on very complex multi-layer documents with lots of effects. The Preferences > Performance panel settings I usually use are shown below; for very complex documents I sometimes change View Quality to Nearest Neighbor, but that is rarely necessary.

[Lee D]

@Mark Oehlschlager You can also try changing the Display setting, if it's set to Metal try changing to OpenGL and see how the brushes perform.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, Lee D said:

@Mark Oehlschlager You can also try changing the Display setting, if it's set to Metal try changing to OpenGL and see how the brushes perform.

My iMac is the same model as the OP's. On mine, the brush performance difference between using Metal & OpenGL display rendering usually is quite small. Metal rendering might be slightly faster but not significantly so.

I assume it might be different if this model could also use Metal compute acceleration but unfortunately its GeForce GTX 660M GPU does not support that. 

BTW, I still wonder why the "Use only integrated GPU" option i available (& if ticked does require a restart) because there is no integrated GPU in this model, just the discrete 660M.

[Mark Oehlschlager]

Thanks all.

FWIW, attached is a shot of my preferences.

Annoyingly, I'm not able to reproduce my problem. I'll just keep monitoring the situation to see if I can better document when and why it happens.

 

[Pierrick]

 

I was about to tell you to de-activate Metal—it slows down performances on 1.7.x— but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be the issue here.

On 8/18/2019 at 12:40 PM, Mark Oehlschlager said:

" late 2012 iMac, 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5; 16 GB RAM; 512 MB VRAM (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M)."

Affinity apps use the main processor intensely. CPU is the main performance factor here, more than the GPU. I'm afraid that a 2012 Core i5, with its limited amount of threads, might be in cause.

 

[vitaprimo]

Isn't Metal supposed to be the baddest meanest API and therefore perform better?

I have this grid of curves I'm trying to gradient-fill but I have to single out the layer by hiding the other to have Designer not to crash on me. How do I know how big is too big? In the video help I see they have like a million layers and it performs quickly, I've huge files with dozens of artboards and hundreds of objects yet this one layer is literally toasting my computer.

I made that grid also in Designer duplicating over and over the same curves, then grouped them to shift them a little and during that Designer performed well. Then exported them to warp them in Photo and imported them back. It's now that as a single layer, single set of curves, it's freezing.

Usually I disable the second GPU to save battery life but with this file it just crashes Designer.

[Polygonius]

On 8/18/2019 at 6:40 AM, Mark Oehlschlager said:

I'm running Mac OS X, High Sierra, 10.13.6, on a late 2012 iMac, 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5; 16 GB RAM; 512 MB VRAM (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M).

Is this a "Retina" mac/display? Izt makes a huge different if the display is "just showing" 4 or 5K, even in absolut non-pixel-apps like all audio-stuff, but with a "moving/dynamic-UI"... 

Just the pure "showing the display" takes a lot of CPU, yes, CPU, not GPU and we are in 2019.... Its a shame from the OS/HW-manufactures to keep "just 2D-displaying" as a thread for CPU, not for GPU! 

In Audio-Apps you have to hide some advanced "display-gimmicks" and you will maybe reduce the "drops and clicks" which is normally an identicator fpr too much CPU.

In AP you will reduce the time for running a very complex macro, if you reduce just the size of the "canvas" (your  simple cmd+1.2,3.... or plus/minus "view"), as smaller the "just display" as faster the REAL computing....

In general you will save save CPU!!!!!! if you reduce the amount of pixels your screen is showing!!!!  But for this - i do not have extra-paid for a 5K display, which i really love, i´m a screen-pixel-junky, i love high, higher, highest resolution.... !!!!!

And thats in 2019!!!! Its a shame, but its not the problem of Serif/AP, its by Apple(OS)/GPU-manufactureres... The OS should be able to decide, ok, this just a GUI-thread -refresh inside an audio-app, it has no really priority and never must refreshed 441000 per second....  25 times per second is "vital enough"... and the GPU should take care  about this, its not really my work...

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Polygonius said:

Is this a "Retina" mac/display?

Nope. It is just like mine, which runs the Affinity apps acceptably if not blazingly fast.

[Othmane]

Hello designers,

I hope you are doing well,

Do anyone find a solution to work on dozens of artboards and dozens of layers without freezing?

 

I changed the performance settings, but i didn't notice any changes for now.

Ram Usage Limit : 16384 MB

Disk Warning Usage At: 32768 MB

Undo Limit: 1024

View Quality: Bilinear (optimale quality)

File Recovery Interval: 300

Display: WARP

Retina Rendering: Automatic (optimal)

 

As for my PC configuration i run on a I7 processor and 16 Gb of Ram

 

Thank you for your help

Have a good day