Settings>Performance>Display

[Stephanie Y]

May I know what is the difference between software, openGL(Basic), openGL and Metal? Which one of them can make the app run faster & smoother? Because I'm working on over 700 pages in Affinity Publisher. But it was so slow when I created hyperlinks, renamed the hyperlinks, and so on. I tried to switch from OpenGL to openGL(Basic), and the app worked a little faster but still slow and manageable. I'm curious what is the difference between them? Is OpenGL(Basic) the most basic than others?

[Callum]

Hi Stephanie,

These are different forms of hardware acceleration its hard to say which one specifically will give the best results as it tends to vary from machine to machine. You should be able to find out what each of them do by googling their names as they aren't specific to Affinity but I will include some links that might be handy below

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_acceleration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL

https://developer.apple.com/metal/

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks
C

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Stephanie Y said:

Which one of them can make the app run faster & smoother?

In theory, Metal should always be fastest but for some Mac configurations the Affinity apps do not work well with it enabled, for example by creating weird screen artifacts or even causing general application instability.

So it is best to give Metal a try & if anything seems off, to drop back to Open GL.

[Stephanie Y]

Hi, I already gave Metal a try and compared them. OpenGL and Software are not so smooth. I think Metal is slightly faster than OpenGL(Basic). Still a little slow when comes to creating and renaming the over 1000 hyperlinks (and maybe more!) I hope the workaround can be faster at the future. Anyway, thanks for answering my question 😃