Very poor overall Affinity V3 performance on Fedora KDE Wayland / AppImage – text input drops to ~8–10 FPS

[SolunaCG]

Hi,

I'm trying to determine whether this is an issue with the Affinity Linux setup, Wine itself, or something else, so I'm posting this as a Q&A rather than opening an issue directly.

I'm using the Affinity V3 AppImage from this repository on Fedora with KDE Plasma Wayland.

System

• Fedora
• KDE Plasma / Wayland
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
• NVIDIA driver 610.57.04
• 2x 2560x1440 @ 144 Hz
• Display scaling: 100%
• Affinity V3
• Using Affinity-3-x86_64.AppImage from this repository's Releases page
• I am not using the Python/GUI installer

Affinity itself starts and is usable, but text input is extremely slow.

Reproduction

1. Start Affinity V3
2. Create a new empty document
3. Create a text frame
4. Type quickly

The typed characters then appear one after another with a noticeable delay, roughly like:

a...b...c...d...

When monitoring FPS, Affinity drops to around 8–10 FPS while typing.

This is reproducible even in a completely new and otherwise empty document.

What I tested

I tried to narrow this down quite a bit:

• Affinity runs through XWayland
• Vulkan works correctly
• The RTX 3090 is detected correctly
• Display scaling is 1.0
• The original AppImage did not appear to load DXVK for D3D11/DXGI
  • DXVK_HUD did not show anything
  • DXVK_LOG_PATH did not produce log files
  • the d3d11.dll and dxgi.dll files in the bundled Wine prefix were identical to Wine's own DLLs
• I therefore tested DXVK 3.0.2 manually inside an extracted copy of the AppImage
• DXVK was then confirmed to be active via the HUD and generated log files
• DXVK correctly detected and used the RTX 3090
• Text input was still equally slow, with FPS dropping to around 8–10 FPS
• I also tested D3D11 through DXVK while using Wine's D3D9 implementation
• No improvement
• I tested changing d3d9.shaderModel from 1 to 3
  • this caused large black UI areas and flickering
  • text input performance did not improve

So at this point it does not look like a simple GPU or DXVK configuration issue.

Additional observation

After further testing, this does not seem to be limited to text input.

Affinity generally feels unusually slow on my system:

• Moving simple objects appears to run at roughly ~20 FPS
• UI elements and panels sometimes visibly appear in stages when opening a document
• Opening documents is inconsistent; Affinity sometimes crashes immediately, while the same file may open successfully on a later attempt
• Text input is simply the most noticeable case, because typed characters visibly appear one by one and FPS drops to around 8–10

I also tested the lowest rendering settings in Affinity:

• View Quality: Nearest Neighbor (Fastest)
• Retina Rendering: Low Quality (Fastest)

These settings make no noticeable performance difference.

So this looks more like a general rendering/UI performance issue than a text-specific issue.

Question

Is this a known Affinity V3 / Wine issue?

More importantly, would this be something that belongs in this project, or would Wine upstream be the more appropriate place to report it?

I don't want to open an issue here if the underlying problem is outside the scope of this project.

I'm happy to provide the DXVK logs, Wine output, screenshots, or run additional tests if useful.

Thanks!

[09bravo]

Hello there, I also faced some similar (not for the text specifically though) issues in sway (which also uses Wayland, if you didn't know) and the "solution" I found was forcing Wayland instead of XWayland through WINEPREFIX=/home/user/.AffinityLinux ./ElementalWarriorWine/bin/wine reg add 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Drivers' /v Graphics /d wayland /f you have to be in the .AffinityLinux directory, which although this fixes the lag it breaks the menus and makes the program unusable, I hope this helps a little (even if it just lets the developers aware of this issue).

P.S: If you want to revert back to XWayland you can do WINEPREFIX=/home/user/.AffinityLinux ./ElementalWarriorWine/bin/wine reg delete 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Drivers' /v Graphics /f

[SolunaCG]

Thanks, this is very interesting. I tested the same registry setting with the V3 AppImage, but Affinity does not start because the bundled Wine reports that no graphics driver can be loaded.
Which exact ElementalWarriorWine/Wine version are you using, and did you install it through ryzendew's Python GUI installer?

[09bravo]

Hm, I think that unfortunately means that your driver is the problem (what is your GPU and CPU?) but it is too early to concluded that . I'm using wine 11.12 (not the zen 4/5 vesrion). Yes I used the GUI installer (I used both but I had more luck with the GUI installer). Anyway regardless if Wayland works or not it is currently in a broken state (I'm having a hard time with the lag because of that). Also one important thing do you have opencl enabled? it improved the text performance for me (I just remembered that as I was typing)

[SolunaCG]

Thanks, I checked this now.

My GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with driver 610.57.04.

OpenCL itself works correctly on the Linux side: clinfo detects the RTX 3090 as an available OpenCL 3.0 CUDA device.

However, I'm currently using the AppImage. Affinity detects the RTX 3090 as its renderer, but when I try to enable "OpenCL compute acceleration", Affinity shows:

"Unsupported Graphics Card – Hardware Acceleration cannot be enabled because your graphics card (or driver) is currently unsupported."

I also noticed that the project's installation documentation explicitly says that the AppImage does not include OpenCL/vkd3d support and recommends the Python GUI installer for this.

So that might actually explain an important difference between our setups.

Since you said enabling OpenCL improved text performance for you, I think testing the GUI installer with Wine 11.12 and OpenCL enabled would be a useful comparison.

[09bravo]

Thanks, I checked this now.

My GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with driver 610.57.04.

OpenCL itself works correctly on the Linux side: clinfo detects the RTX 3090 as an available OpenCL 3.0 CUDA device.

However, I'm currently using the AppImage. Affinity detects the RTX 3090 as its renderer, but when I try to enable "OpenCL compute acceleration", Affinity shows:

"Unsupported Graphics Card – Hardware Acceleration cannot be enabled because your graphics card (or driver) is currently unsupported."

I also noticed that the project's installation documentation explicitly says that the AppImage does not include OpenCL/vkd3d support and recommends the Python GUI installer for this.

So that might actually explain an important difference between our setups.

Since you said enabling OpenCL improved text performance for you, I think testing the GUI installer with Wine 11.12 and OpenCL enabled would be a useful comparison.

It is a good thing that your GPU is from the 3000 series (very good compatibility) so I'd be surprised if it is a driver issue. I also faced that error (but for different reasons, it turned out I forgot to install the OpenCL driver) but I don't think you will find a lot of trouble if you use the GUI installer (hopefully at least). And finally I recommend using dxvk because vkd3d was not working at all for me (but it could be because my GPU is RTX 5060 so take that with a grain of salt)