Andy Somerfield, Affinity Photo lead developer, revealed today that they are working on 3d texturing tools in Affinity Photo.
Source:
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Haha, beat me to it! 
They are not rushing into it, which is good. Got to remember to have realistic expectations for the first iteration of this new workflow. It will likely only be useful for doing finer edits of your texture maps and not a full on replacement of Substance Painter. They have been teasing a bunch of stuff for 1.9 and I am pretty confident that they will be able to deliver on the 3D painting and texturing aspect eventually after what they’ve already announced is coming to the Beta in some weeks.
Serif is going to need a lot of feedback from experienced 3D artists to ensure quality control. We do not want to end up with what happened with the 3D features in Photoshop which led to Adobe buying up the competition.
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I need to find my forum login for over there again but somebody probably needs to nudge them towards UDIM support early on.
Anyway, it’s a really cool program however I find the Windows version is in a very distant second place to the Mac one, which rocks in the performance department.
I wrote your question on the forums.
Yeah, the Windows version lacks a bit compared to the Mac version. It may be easier to develop for the Mac, but I wish they put some extra effort to bridge the gap a bit. I know that GPU acceleration is coming for Windows, which is what you’re likely referring to when talking about performance.
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Thanks!
I think it’s just that the Affinity suite started on the Mac and its also their main development platform as I understand it. The performance difference was really noticeable even before they went with Metal on the Mac builds.
I had a 2012 Mini noticeably outperform my 4 Ghz Windows PC on the same files. 
No problem! 
Got any examples of what kind of files you mean? Performance got a lot better in the last two major releases on Windows on my end and haven’t noticed any massive performance hiccups unless we’re talking about massive thousands of pixels brushes, which GPU acceleration will help with a bunch. Have been able to paint on 5k x 3-4k canvases which are my standard workspace as well as used multiple artboards of similar size in one document.
Pretty decent despite not running on a GPU.
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Interesting development!
I didn’t know AP doesn’t use GPU on Windows. I bought it back when it was in a very early macOS-only stage. Later I moved to Windows and had to buy it again. 
And I haven’t used it since then, because I’ve got an Adobe Photoshop subscription that comes with the great Adobe Portfolio site CMS, so I might as well use Photoshop, although I like AP more. This new texture painting feature makes it more interesting again though.
Nothing special really: 4k and 8k layered textures in 16 bits, layer effects/styles, healing/cloning and regular painting.
I compared an i5 2.5 Ghz Mini vs my i7 4 Ghz Windows desktop and the Mini came out on top consistently in this scenario. Plus at the time Photoshop did not have brush smoothing/guided strokes, unlike Affinity. Bought a Mac Pro soon after that.
My Windows license is so far installed merely for file compatibility.
Heres to hoping they don’t move ahead too quickly into new neat-o features though because there are some rather basic usability things in need of adressing first, plus scripting is still not in there.
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They showed a demo where they stated the incredible speed gain by using Metal.
That might explain the difference.
But I assume Metal was just a transition to a new graphics library, and AP already used the GPU since the start on macOS. I remember a ‘Use GPU’ option in the preferences since the start, if I’m not mistaking.
Thanks, I thought so.
Just checked Affinity Designer (haven’t got AP installed at the moment, because I’ve already got Photoshop), and it uses the GPU:
Metal is used for both accelerating the UI but also calculating the operations!
I assume what you see in the windows prefs panel is like with adobe just the UI acceleration option.
Adobe only has access to openCL on windows to drive functions so I think the same is true with Affinity.
Check this
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Blender people, Affinity Photo is on 50% sales
basically an offline Photoshop with extras
- super customisable workplace
- zero learning curve clean modern interface
- awesome healing brush/ erase tools/ brushes
- compositing, auto-stitch equirectangular, edit HDR in 360
- regular fuss-free updates
- lots of prosumer video tuts
- Blender Filmic auto-load script
- GPU+OpenCL acceleration (on my Win10 GTX1080)
I bought it back in 2017, can’t do without it now
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Can it handle multilayered openEXR from Blender?
Nice.
I hear the UI is pretty intuitive. Since I need an Image Editor about every 3 months or even less and my current Editor (Photoline) is rather unintuitive I keep forgetting how to do the simplest stuff.
Will give Affinity a try.
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I own Photoline as well since many many years ago, eventhough it has many functionalities I have switched to AP, it feels more robust. But as any software, it has its own quirks.
Indeed Affinity UI is very intuitive. So much so that after I got it in 2017, I didn’t even watch the intro videos, dived straight in and have fun. Then I continued to discover surprise goodies, like the HDR edit in 360 thing which is superb for erasing unwanted bits. Updating versions also a breeze, no need to uninstall/reinstall, just click downloaded file and voila.
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I trashed adobe and switched to all affinity apps
I also offer this to my students
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