CPU & GPU Usage by Design Apps
Marc Edwards of Bjango did an interesting comparison of CPU and GPU usage of various design applications. This isn’t about which tool is more performant, instead it’s about how much the GPU is used relative to the CPU, and whether an application takes advantage of multiple cores. Here’s how the test was performed:
Draw lots of rectangles that have a fill and a stroke. Then select all the rectangles and rotate them as a group. How many rectangles? As many as was required to make the tool get very stressed. It was a different number of elements for each tool, so this isn’t a like for like comparison. It’s more about resource usage and what’s important when speccing a Mac for design work.
Note that Marc considers more resource usage a good thing:
For this test, lower usage is bad news, not good news. I pushed them all until the canvas was very laggy. All going well, the app should be pegging the CPU or GPU, making the best use of available resources.
I’m not sure that conclusion follows, I don’t think it’s possible to make that kind of performance conclusion from this test, but that’s not its intended purpose anyway, the idea is show which hardware resources are most important for each application.
As to which graph Edwards thinks makes the best use of resources, he added in a tweet:
I honestly think Figma shows the most ideal profile.