Saturday, Jul 27, 2019

The Performance of Design Apps

Marc Edwards follows up his previous look at CPU and GPU usage with some performance tests:

1. Rotating 16,384 rounded rectangles.
2. Changing the color of the rectangles.
3. Undoing that change.

Edwards declares Affinity Designer¹ the best overall winner of the above tests.

He followed up with a few more:

• The file size of the test document.
• Opening the test document.
• Running “fit to window” after zooming in.

I’d summarize the results of all of the tests by saying Affinity Designer, Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch all performed comparably, while Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator clearly performed worse.

---

1. Surprisingly, Affinity Designer performed better using OpenGL over Apple’s own Metal. This can be configured in Affinity Designer’s “Performance” preference. ↩︎