Janichsan

…so, shortly after the release of the 1.7 patches.

Not that it helps you and it's a bit incidental for this discussion, but in my past experience Apple always denied responsibility for any problems with third-party apps. I had several cases where third-party apps from the MAS stopped working or had severe issues after an OS update, and in all cases had similar discussions as you had with both the app developers and Apple support. The app developers pointed at Apple, Apple pointed at the developers. And you know what? In all but one of these cases, it turned out indeed to be Apple's fault, as the issues were fixed in the next OS update without the third-party developers ever updating their app.

Well, if it helps: you don't really have to fully switch to OpenGL. Just disabling Metal compute acceleration already did the trick for me.

I can confirm this: Metal compute acceleration massively decelerates Affinity Photo.

Any news on this?

I'll sent an email with a link to the file. With now ~230 MB, it's a bit too big for the forum or email… I tried the beta and I can in fact export and PDF of my document with it. However, the resulting PDF is quite problematic: not only do the rasterised parts stand clearly out (which they don't on the PDF of the older version of my document), something with the PDF causes OS X's preview to freeze when zooming in (again, that does not happen with the equivalent older PDF). That said, I think I could narrow down the problems I have to the rasterisation. When I turn off the rasterisation in the export settings, I can also produce a PDF with AD 1.3.5., unfortunately with some huge blank holes where objects where supposed to be.

I'm running in problems when I'm trying to export a fairly complex (and huge) Affinity Designer document as PDF: whenever I try that, AD hangs during the export, using up to 700% CPU. The symptoms of the problem actually seem to be very similar to those described here. However, for me exporting to bitmap formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF) works fine – just the PDF export is problematic. I could export an older version of my document to PDF without problems earlier, but now even the export of this older version hangs. I'm not 100% certain if it was the same version of AD (1.3.5) back then, or if there was an update in between. I'm running Affinity Designer under OS X 10.10.5.