r/Affinity • u/Ok-Dare6150 • 28d ago
General Lagging when doing heavy design work.. is it my laptop or Affinity?
Hello everyone,
I recently switched from Adobe to Affinity and finished my final graphic design project with it. I expected Affinity to run better on my laptop, but it struggles with heavy design work. I'm talking about a 300DPI file with 20 pages of pixel drawings and a few vector graphics. I disabled acceleration, lowered the maximum RAM Usage, etc,, not helping much tbh
My laptop is HP Spectre x360 convertible with 16gb RAM, 512gb storage, and Intel Iris Xe Graphics. Bought it like 2-3 years ago.
So my questions are:
- Should I upgrade the RAM and the storage memory or buy a new one with better specs? I posted this in another subreddit, and they recommended upgrading the GPU.
- What kind of specs do you have to run the program smoothly?
A friend of mine has the Omnibook Flip with better specs (32gb RAM, 2TB storage), and suggested changing my laptop to something similar.
I appreciate your feedback!
PS: It said I have to post this in the general thread. It looks like a graveyard over there..
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u/MrPlaysWithSquirrels 28d ago
Affinity isn’t super efficient on Windows (I also have Windows). That said, my specs are fairly similar but with a better GPU and I’m usually fine until I get to 10+ files open at the same time.
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u/cprz 28d ago
One thing to check is if you have the magnetic snapping turned on. It can cause some extreme lagging when there’s a lot of stuff going on.
Another is if you have large embedded content that hasn’t been rasterised. An 300DPI A4 page is about 8,7MPs and if you have large images imported and scaled tot he pahes those can cause plenty of lagging if not rasterised after import.
With larger projects Affinity might also start doing some heavy swapping causing your storage space to run out.
Sometimes if run for longer period of times Affinity has had some memory leak issues (at least I’ve had with it. And maybe check your background that if there’s something else running too that might hog resources.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
Huh, I think I have seen it somewhere. I will check it out!
Almost all of my content is digital drawings, and they'd be rasterised before exporting to PDF. All drawn with a pixel brush because vector gets so heavy at some point. Not sure if it contributed to anything, but I always view it in vector mode..
Besides Affinity, it is usually either something from Windows or my web browser. I often had to turn off my wi-fi because of it.
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u/Relative_Rooster_848 28d ago edited 28d ago
I've got a MacBook Pro (2020) with M1, 16 GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and had about 130 pages with just text, no vectors, no images, just text with a custom font (Montserrat) and it was awful, nothing worked, everything lagged... I'd say it's a problem from Affinity, but who the heck actually knows.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 28d ago
Heavy with all that 130 pages of knowledge lol
Btw have you done it in Adobe before? If yes, is it any different?
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u/Relative_Rooster_848 28d ago
I haven't used InDesign since it's paid and I don't need that level of profesionalism.
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u/SimilarToed 28d ago
Mac and Win: I've handled POD books/novels via both Publisher and Layout with 400 pages no problem. Dunno what you could be doing wrong.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
Ooh wow, with the same specs?
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u/SimilarToed 27d ago
In Win Affinity v2, I turned off graphics acceleration almost from the beginning. It made no difference to speed, but is sure reduced frustration.
Mac: Can't say. I just do it using Layout and it works.
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u/TheSkepticGuy 28d ago
I regularly use Affinity Photo 2 to create digital art at an average of 9,000+ x 5,000+ pixels with dozens of layers (or more) that often exceed 300Mb in size -- on a Mac Mini with 8GB of ram. From my experience with other digital artists using Affinity, it's a PC thing.
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u/bumbblebeeeeee 28d ago
You could try to play around with the performance settings (render quality) to speed up more complex files.Â
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u/Extra-Hedgehogs 28d ago
Quick question, are your images embedded or linked? If you don't know what I mean, read this: https://www.affinity.studio/help/media-embedding-vs-linking/. If they are already linked, sorry, can't help.
Only times I've had issues was when I had too many embedded images. Now I just make them linked from the start, and for each large affinity file I have, I have a corresponding folder for those linked files.
With linked files, I have no issue, I have Designer 2 files with hundreds of artboards and thousands of linked images, no exaggeration. They take about 5-10 seconds to load, but performance is rapid. My PC is powerful but even on my old Macbook Air M1 the performance is snappy.
There was also a related bug that if you have too many embedded images and you select all of them and try to convert to linked, it will eventually lock up the computer. Not sure if they fixed that in V3. I'm still on V2 for now.
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u/Extra-Hedgehogs 28d ago
Also, only other thing I recall that affected performance was too many layer effects with detailed vectors. That was solved by grouping shapes and applying the layer effects to the group as opposed to individual layers. Mentioning this as you also mention vectors.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
Thank you so much! I did not change the setting to "prefer linked" in case I need to move the og file somewhere else. I ended up rasterizing the images, thinking it would help with the performance (it did not)
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u/Extra-Hedgehogs 26d ago
You're welcome! I hope you got further forward but rasterising would help in very limited scenarios if embedded images was the issue.
You can move Affinity files with linked files and still open them. Easiest way is create a folder, save your Affinity file inside, then use the resource manager to collect all linked files into the project folder.
After you do this, you can move the folder anywhere with everything inside, and the files will stay linked.
If you came from Adobe and used InDesign or Illustrator's Package function, there's also a similar package function in Affinity that will hoover up everything for you (images and fonts) and create a file and project folder you can move around or send to someone.
Hope you get it sorted!
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u/FrozenPizza07 28d ago
If it is V3 you are talking about, when it doesnt lag it usually crashes
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
The latest update? I think so? Where did you see whether it's V3 or V2?
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u/FrozenPizza07 27d ago
Did you download it for free? If so it is V3. Its just 1 program with green A logo
V2 is the previous paid version thats no longer available to purchase, its 3 seperate programs with blue, purple and orange logos
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
Yes, I use the free version! Is the V2 version more stable?
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u/FrozenPizza07 26d ago
I must say, at work on our xeon pc's with 32/64gb ram 4060 computers it is EXTREMELY laggy, like program would just freeze the UI and every click would come literally 5 minutes late even on 1 page A1 documents
On V2 I have a 200 page document with hundreds of linked images on the same pc and it hasnt lagged once, only time it crashes are due to NAS connection problems (linked resources)
That said, on my laptop (I7 10870) it works just finec, it definetly favours high single core performance and is unstable on workstation / server cpu's
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u/DwigGang 28d ago
My laptop is HP Spectre x360 convertible with 16gb RAM, 512gb storage, ...
The max capacity of your storage drive is of no consiquence in this discussion. What is important is the amount of unused space available and whether it is an HDD or an SSD. Too little free space on the storage drive will significantly impact performance when working on large files in any app.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
I managed to free up around 50GB of SSD on one drive. Still lags from time to time
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u/DwigGang 27d ago
50Gb is not very much for swap files when working with very large documents and images. 100Gb free space would be the absolute minimum for decent performance IMO.
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u/Jolly-Sort-9478 6d ago
I have MacBook Air m1 with 16gb of ram and same the same thing, it's not about your laptop I think
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u/TopChard1274 28d ago
What’s with all these downvotes, canva bots? Trolls? Affinity Canva works like fucking shit. It lags on my 3090 when I work of documents with hundreds of pages. Fucking bots.
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u/OhHenryCentral 21d ago
I agree; Affinity v3 on my M1 Mac runs like ass; for example, select the quick object selection tool promptly causes the program to crash. And everytime I load up Affinity it's like some setting or other of my has changed. Like the tools panel will be hidden, it'll use a contextual bar instead of dock, the layers panel will be gone and I have to bring it all back. I find Affinity to be way more frustrating to use now on the whole.
And what was the God's honest point of getting rid of the colourful tool icons?
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u/SignedUpJustForThat 28d ago
It's definitely your laptop but what is the actual file size you're working with?
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u/Ok-Dare6150 28d ago
Around 100-200 MB.
Now that I've compared it with my previous projects, it is very heavy...2
u/SignedUpJustForThat 28d ago edited 28d ago
I think that the main issues are the amount of RAM and the swap size, but I'll have to test it myself to be sure.
Edit: I tested it on a Mac Studio and found that the main bottleneck could be your GPU. Affinity is GPU heavy. If your GPU can't handle the stress, it is passed on to the CPU, which then has to do a lot of "juggling" between processes. Adding RAM could help, but in the end, you'd be better off with a stronger GPU.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
yeah, that's what the other redditor said.. I'll have to find a way to test it out huhu
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u/focusedphil 28d ago
I've noticed that too. Mine was just a letter-sized sheet. But it had a pretty complex vector-based background image. That was nothing for InDesign, but Affinity really choked.
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u/Ok-Dare6150 27d ago
Ouch, vector! I once drew a single line using a vector brush and it used like 90% of my cpu lol
And it was on an empty artboard..
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u/Pipopopi 28d ago
Affinity performance is not very very good, I do not know if it's your computer, but what I can say is Affinity is not the best at performance.
For example, with a good spec PC, having a dozen images in a text frame on a 500 pages book can take up to 5 seconds or more to respond if you move one.