Affinity Photo, Publisher, Designer get big performance boosts in v1.10 update

What you need to know

• Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher all received updates to version 1.10.
• Memory improvements now allow Affinity Publisher to smoothly load documents with thousands of pages.
• Affinity Designer's rendering is up to 10 times faster for complex documents than it was previously.

Serif, the makers of Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, have rolled out an update for the entire Affinity suite of applications. Affinity v1.10 brings improvements to all three apps, including improved rendering in Affinity Designer, better blending in Affinity Photo, and faster loading of large documents in Affinity Publisher.

There isn't a full changelog of the Affinity v1.10 update at this time, but Serif shares many of the new features in a recent post.

Memory management in Affinity Publisher has been completely rewritten as part of the update. As a result, Serif promises that the app can instantly load "huge documents" with thousands of pages. Live editing, which lets you see edits in real-time before committing to them, is also smoother in the app following the update.

Affinity Designer's rendering engine is now up to ten times faster when handling complex documents. Serif managing director Ash Hewson explains that this comes in handy when bringing PDFs into the app, "While it's quite rare for anyone to create designs with hundreds of thousands of objects, although some people do, we are seeing many examples of PDFs being imported into Designer – for example that were generated in a CAD app or similar – which can easily have that number."

Serif explains that Affinity Photo "has also received extensive performance tweaks." The only specific example shared is that blending layers together is more efficient following the update.

The updates to the app are free and available through either the Affinity website or the Microsoft Store, depending on where you purchased any of the apps.