Software Update: Affinity Suite 1.10

Serif has released version 1.10 of Affinity Suite. The Affinity suite consists of the Photo, Designer and Publisher programs, and can be regarded as the counterparts of, for example, Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator and InDesign. The software is available for Windows, macOS and iOS, and is offered semi-temporarily with a 50% discount. The changelogs for the individual programs can be here are found, this is the announcement for version 1.10:

1.10: Get ready for super-powered performance

We’ve completely re-engineered the architecture of our apps to bring you some massive performance improvements across the suite, on all operating systems. Available now, our 1.10 update provides a remarkably smoother, faster workflow and pretty outstanding speed increases.

We pride ourselves on the performance Affinity apps offer creatives, but over the last few months we’ve taken a step back to really see what further improvements could be made. As it turns out, we were able to implement some major optimizations which have had a huge impact, particularly on very large complex documents.

Affinity 1.10 (which you can download now!) is our biggest performance update ever, and with the improvements being placed right at the heart of the software, it’s an update that all users will benefit from. So whether you’re using Affinity on Mac, Windows PC or iPad, you’ll be able to do more, faster.

The first area of ​​focus has been memory management in Affinity Publisher. This has had a complete re-write, and now enables huge documents—even with thousands of pages and many gigabytes’ worth of linked images—to offer instant loading times, smooth live editing and super-fast scroll, pan and zoom across whole files .

In Affinity Designer, our main area of ​​focus was the rendering engine and seeing how we could improve the handling of highly complex documents, potentially with hundreds of thousands of objects or layers. While it’s not the norm for users to create designs with so many layers, we were seeing many examples of PDFs being imported into Designer (generated in a CAD app or similar for example) with those high numbers of objects, and so this was something we wanted to account for.

Our hard work in this area has really paid off though, and documents are now rendering up to ten times faster in 1.10 than before. While this incredible improvement is particularly noticeable on more complex, massive documents, working with less complex documents is remarkably smoother and snappier as well.

Affinity Photo has also had many performance tweaks, most importantly in adding some greater efficiency in the way that layers are blended together. This new approach gives options to maintain slick performance even after building up highly complex compositions—all while retaining a non-destructive workflow.

On top of these fundamental performance improvements, IDML import in Affinity Publisher is up to four times faster, text flow speeds are nearly doubled, and there have been a whole host of other tweaks and stability improvements across the suite in 1.10.