3. VS now crashing after settings change

VS now crashing after settings change

  • T

    Hi, I'm one of the Affinity Designer boat people, trying out VS for the first time. There's a lot to like, including things I used to use in Corel Draw years ago and haven't seen since then. Excellent tool set and I would be very happy to step across.

    But – I was trying to eke out more performance and I set one of the settings (display?) to OpenCL and then it crashed on launch. It even made the whole Mac hang and I had to force restart.

    I'm using Catalina, and only just found out that OpenCL was dumped in one of the updates to the OS, so I won't try it again!

    I tried removing the plist file (launched but crashed on opening file) and then uninstalled VS using AppCleaner and reinstalled it but the new install is now crashing just the same.

    My only issue so far (apart from being locked out at the moment) is the large performance difference between AD and VS on my machine. I can do pretty heavy work on AD and the fans may spin up but it keeps on going, whereas I'm getting a lot of lag with VS. Interestingly, the fans don't spin up at all in VS, so it's almost like it's not trying very hard.

    Any help on both of these issues is very welcome.
    Tony

    0 1 Reply
  • administrators

    @Tonyrambler said in VS now crashing after settings change:

    and only just found out that OpenCL was dumped

    OpenCL support is spotty on Mac. What Mac model you have? (The ones with NVidia or Intel GPUs are even more problematic).
    The current VS settings are stored in: ~/Library/Application Support/NumericPath/VectorStyler 1.2/ folder
    The ~/Library folder is hidden, but you can access it with Finder -> Go -> Got to folder menu.

    Remove the content of these folder, or just the content of /vector/data/resources/ inside of the above folder.

    Then VS will start with the default settings.

    For performance, it depends what Mac model you have. Metal compute should work on Catalina, and for Display Mode also select Metal.

    What kind of design causes VS to be slow? Images or vectors?

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  • T

    Thanks for the quick reply!

    It's a mid-2012 MBPro 13",
    2.5 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5
    Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB
    16GB Ram
    SSD

    I've deleted the files you suggested and now it's all running again, with Metal selected in each setting. I've turned off Direct Preview as well.

    I'm using just vector at the moment.

    The background to the whole artboard (only A4 for this test) is 3 rectangles overlaid, all with gradient fills, with the upper 2 using transparency set to AND blend mode. Working on these gradients the lag gets very slow, but the fans are only up to 2600 and can't be heard. I'd be happy if they got a lot faster.

    Speed improves if I hide these gradients and use a dummy working background with a solid colour.

    1 1 Reply
  • administrators

    @Tonyrambler said in VS now crashing after settings change:

    Intel HD Graphics 4000

    This is the problem unfortunately. I will test with this kind of GPU and Catalina/Metal more, but with OpenCL it is not going to work well.

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    T
     1 Reply
  • T

    Yes, it's definitely getting old!

    0 1 Reply

  • @Tonyrambler It should work now. I had the same issue with my previous MacBook and choosing "Metal" was the solution.

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