Ugly Vector rendering in APhoto

[hifred]

I see a great discrepancy between the vector rendering quality in APhoto and Designer. While things look crisp at all Zoom levels in Designer (as one would expect), all roundish Vector shapes created with its native tools show aliasing (stairstepping) here – unless the document is displayed at 100%. It appears to me as if Vectors were rendered on screen as bitmaps here – is this a special display mode I have activated by error? Sending a file would be pointless – I see this in every empty document, as soon as I draw a circle.

[hifred]

At random magnification

At 100% (Things look better on screen than in this screen grab)

[MEB]

Hi hifred,
In Affinity Photo all elements are rasterised for screen/rendering - so all vector elements will only look sharp/defined at 100% view. If you zoom in you will start see effect of the rasterisation - the vector elements will start looking  "pixelated" as if they were raster images. This is by design and is how other image editors also behave. Affinity Designer doesn't perform this rasterisation thus the differences you are seeing.

[hifred]

6 hours ago, MEB said:

In Affinity Photo all elements are rasterised for screen/rendering - so all vector elements will only look sharp/defined at 100% view.

Thank you MEB,
I was not aware of that. While don't understand why one doesn't utilize the ( existing) vector display pipeline for vector shapes and only rasterizes at export time that's at least an explanation. What I can say is that things don't look pretty on a screen with already quite small pixels on 2560x1440 25 inch displays (yeah, worse than PS).

Oddly, Publisher uses Designers vector engine and renders nice and crisp vectors: I hope, we can agree that it is the program in the  Affinity-suite which serves least graphics creation demands. That may make sense programmatically, as Publisher is closely related to Designer in its core, but certainly makes zero sense from the user-perspective.

[Pšenda]

On 11/30/2018 at 4:28 PM, hifred said:

At 100% (Things look better on screen than in this screen grab)

View Mode Pixel or Vector? Of course, the vector will always be rendered better.

[hifred]

27 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

View Mode Pixel or Vector? Of course, the vector will always be rendered better.

This thread is about vector display inside Affinity Photo. Unfortunately Affinity Photo rasterizes all vectors for display, see MEBs answer.

[Pšenda]

Yes, but you compare it with the ADesigner. If you switch it to Pixel mode, it will display/rasterize the same.

[hifred]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

Yes, but you compare it with the ADesigner. If you switch it to Pixel mode, it will display/rasterize the same.

I can't follow your reasoning. I only compare Affinity Photo to Designer because I expected Vectors to display at the same visual quality as inside Designer. I further don't see a good reason to display pixelated Vectors inside the graphics creation app Affinty Photo – while the Page Layout program (Publisher) shows nice vectors.

Result of the current choice: The work file inside Affinity Photo looks – a lot – worse than an exported pdf of the same file.