Inkscape, the open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator, has been updated to 1.3, bringing a number of performance improvements.

Inkscape is the popular, cross-platform vector graphics editor that is available as open-source software. The latest version, 1.3, brings a number of improvements:

A lot of effort has gone into improving the performance and speed of all aspects of Inkscape. This involved the refactoring of inefficient code, rewriting how Inkscape works with patterns, moving bitmap tracing into a separate thread and so much more.

Canvas rendering is now both multithreaded, and done outside of Inkscape’s main process thread.

If your computer’s processor has more than one core (which it most likely does), this can result in a 2–4× speedup while zooming / panning / transforming objects.

The number of processor cores used for rendering can be adjusted in Edit ➞ Preferences ➞ Rendering ➞ Number of Threads. By default, Inkscape tries to be as fast as possible by using as many cores as possible.

The list of changes is exhaustive, but can be found in more detail in this blog post.