Today Serif announced updates to its Affinity creative apps. These include official support for macOS Monterey as well as optimizations for Apple's new M1 Pro, M1 Max and 14-inch MacBook Pros.
Ashley Hewson is the managing director of Affinity developer Serif. The latest MacBook Pros with M1 Pro or M1 Max chips will offer "stunning speed" when used with all three apps, according to Ashley.
"The industry's reflection point is the new GPU. It has compute performance that surpasses almost all discrete GPU hardware but still retains the key benefits and advantages of unified memory. We had to reexamine the performance bottlenecks and reevaluate our approach. It was clear that the old rules no longer work. The benchmark score for the M1 Max 32core GPU is around 30,000, which is absolutely unsurpassed by any other GPU score that we have measured. The benchmark results in version 1.10.3 show that our changes have improved the performance of the M1 chip by roughly 10%.
The GPU is not the only win. The Vector (Multi CPU score) in #M1Max is the best we have ever measured (for Affinity Editor users) and the Combined (Single GPU score (for Affinity Publishing, by some margin). Andy Somerfield (@andysomerfield), October 25, 2021
Hewson claims that the new MacBook Pro features a LiquidRetinaXDR display. This displays completely transforms how AffinityPhoto photographers edit images.
The new XDR display can also be a game-changer. Our time was spent trying to overcome the fact that cameras capture a little more light than what can be displayed on standard screens. Liquid Retina XDR displays the entire dynamic range of dSLRs. This allows you to change the way you develop raw images. Not only for bracketed merge shots but also for single images. No more need to compress highlights to extract detail.
The Affinity apps are also optimized to render smooth at 120fps on new MacBook Pros. This is similar to iPad's equivalent Affinity app.
All Affinity apps running on macOS are now compatible with the 1.10.3 update. Existing users can download it for free. Affinity app can be purchased individually at $60 each, with no subscription.
