3. Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler

Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler


  • @VectorStyler I will send you the sample file tomorrow.

    @gotanidea Text rendering is a very different kettle of tea testing context.

    I tested your test text in various apps. First editing text. Then moving the entire text box.

    • Illustrator has no issues whatsoever. Text editing works without lag, and moving the text box is entirely smooth at any zoom setting. Zooming in and out is fast and responsive.

    • PhotoLine has no issues with text editing, just like Illustrator. Moving a text box zoomed out also no issues (not as smooth as Illy). Zoomed at medium level moving the text box is a bit laggy. Zoomed in close moving the text is quite snappy again.
      Zooming in and out is laggy when a lot of the text is rendered on-screen, though.

    • Affinity Designer has no issues whatsoever while editing text. Moving the text box is very laggy at perhaps 2-3 frames per second. Text content cannot keep up with the movement.
      Zooming in and out is fast and responsive though.

    • Inkscape introduces long delays when editing the text. For a short sentence it may take a few seconds before it updates. Not workable. Moving the box is ever so slightly more responsive than Designer (or about the same).
      Zooming in and out is somewhat laggy. Like PhotoLine it stutters more when a large text amount is rendered in the view.

    • VectorStyler also introduces a lot of lag during text editing. It takes around a second for a new character to be typed. It is unworkable.
      Moving the text box zoomed out is about as fast as Inkscape, but the text is greeked out. Zoomed in a tad to display the actual text halves performance.

    Obviously this test is more academic than anything else. Yet it does show a general performance problem within this context with both Inkscape and VectorStyler. At the very least text editing shouldn't be affected that much by text quantity. Not when three other apps have no issues whatsoever with text editing.

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    @Bones said in Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler:

    I tested your test text in various apps. First editing text. Then moving the entire text box.

    Illustrator has no issues whatsoever. Text editing works without lag, and moving the text box is entirely smooth at any zoom setting. Zooming in and out is fast and responsive.

    Thanks for the tests.

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    @Bones There will be improvements in the (near) future for the rendering speed on Windows. Clearly there are problems when large number of gradients are mixed in with vectors.

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  • Affinity has spectacular performance; it must be built into the fundamental architecture from the bottom up. I have drawn really complex things in Affinity with effects and gradients by the hundreds, and my very old laptops with those ridiculously simple Intel graphics chips built into the motherboard delivered an impressive effort. I actually never really noticed such low performance that it got in the way of what I was doing. I hardly noticed it. And then, on these low-spec Windows machines, I was free from the driver issues that are on Windows with advanced graphics cards, which ultimately moved my work over to 100% Apple equipment on M1 and M2 chips, where I have worked wonderfully smoothly since.

    My sense is that programs built up without such a fundamental focus on performance will have a very hard time achieving it by optimizing and refactoring. My good experience with Affinity on terrible hardware makes me smile when people talk about needing hardware that can almost run ChatGPT to use graphics programs seriously. No, not according to my experiences. My experience is probably that people buy and put 20 Porsches in front of a grain silo on roller skate wheels and do not see the potential for improvement in the actual silo they are pulling.

    Just to say, optimizations can be a long haul with less effect if it happens from the top down. I have experienced this so often with software.

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  • @Ingolf I suspect, at least in part, one reason Affinity performs so well is that the rendering to the display is not forced to be accurate. In too many instances I've had to recheck my source or export for even very small images because my viewport is blurrier even if I open the file straight from the OS, with no changes (yet). Yes, even at 100%.

    Other programs may be slower, but at least I can fully trust what their engine shows on my display and it is consistent.

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    @debraspicher said in Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler:

    @Ingolf I suspect, at least in part, one reason Affinity performs so well is that the rendering to the display is not forced to be accurate. In too many instances I've had to recheck my source or export for even very small images because my viewport is blurrier even if I open the file straight from the OS, with no changes (yet). Yes, even at 100%.

    Other programs may be slower, but at least I can fully trust what their engine shows on my display and it is consistent.

    Adobe Illustrator's rendering is accurate with a very good performance, although no vector graphics software has beaten Macromedia Freehand's performance yet.

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  • @debraspicher said in Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler:

    @Ingolf I suspect, at least in part, one reason Affinity performs so well is that the rendering to the display is not forced to be accurate. In too many instances I've had to recheck my source or export for even very small images because my viewport is blurrier even if I open the file straight from the OS, with no changes (yet). Yes, even at 100%.

    Other programs may be slower, but at least I can fully trust what their engine shows on my display and it is consistent.

    Oh. Not a problem in my work, never battled with that issue.

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  • @gotanidea said in Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler:

    Adobe Illustrator's rendering is accurate with a very good performance, although no vector graphics software has beaten Macromedia Freehand's performance yet.

    Not my experience but my stuff if seriously complex. Importing it into Illustrator never was an impressive experience.

    But I do appriciate if the rendering can be configured to be extremely accurate or not because I don't need it that much during the many, many hours of working, zooming, panning, adjusting. I need a responsive and ultrafast update.

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  • @Ingolf said in Affinity Designer vs VectorStyler:

    Not my experience but my stuff if seriously complex. Importing it into Illustrator never was an impressive experience.

    But I do appriciate if the rendering can be configured to be extremely accurate or not because I don't need it that much during the many, many hours of working, zooming, panning, adjusting. I need a responsive and ultrafast update.

    Let me explain for the record. I get the feeling this thread will age very well.

    For my case, it's less important that the viewport is incredibly accurate for vectors while working, but when I check the work, I have to have the control to see the accurate result should I need to. Some of that is down to adding my personal touch to curves but also technical requirements (pixel-hinting smaller graphics).

    There is a long-standing bug that affects my setup where AD will show "Pixel Mode" as a 200% view if I have a DPI scale =>150%. I must use Retena because it will show the proper view, but then also trust a new bug won't appear in its place, so I just altered my DPI scale OS-wide at a smaller scale to compensate. I'd run into so many bugs using Affinity software that I basically don't trust their products anymore for anything mission critical.

    For Photo, I guess because the design of Layers are vector-based, they also may not display accurately during viewport fits in Windows. It's so subtle it can look like the image is of lesser quality or is compressed, but it's detrimental to understanding what will happen with the end result clarity-wise (especially with any filters). Photo's viewport is very unreliable for me. When this happens, I can be overworking an image without realizing it or missing details I could have worked with sooner to come out with a better final product."

    Edit: Anyway, I don't intend to beat any drums. I do want to share details like this because it better illuminates on my own use case.

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  • I completely agree. I'm just advocating for understanding how good, good performance is, and it's probably hard to compare programs that are structured differently.

    What I really appreciate about Affinity is that it delivers superb performance and fundamentally renders what I draw in very, very high quality and updates instantly. I NEVER have pixel view turned on, and I use view without FX to give the computer a break more than to get better performance. That’s how quickly Affinity draws the user interface on my M1 and M2 Mac. And even on older Windows machines.

    So, it's utterly surreal when I move the illustration over to other programs as pure vector, and these programs struggle to render it in something that can be remotely compared to Affinity.

    I'm not looking for programs that continuously optimize one function or another to draw a bit faster, but fundamentally can display and update my work quickly in high quality. While I work, they may well cheat a bit with visual tricks, because I can't use anything that involves a total recalculation of everything I see every time I zoom or change something. If I have a HQ rendering option too, I'm good to go.

    The classic preferences for rendering quality that no one understands, which are also in VS, are not understood or used by the average users. There is probably more need for Draft, Normal, and High Quality versions, where only draft is visibly worse.

    But long story short, performance is important for us who do complex things, and for me to work meaningfully and see how it roughly ends up, it needs to be fast and look reasonably final. Affinity has shown that it's possible to come close with really good performance.

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