Figma is slow on Apple M1

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1

Recently moved to Windows on macOS.

iMac M1 16gb.

Immediately noticed some microfreezes. But I did not understand if they really exist, there is nothing to instantly compare with.

The problem was revealed when I started to move the group of 9 frames. Frames followed the cursor with a long delay.

Yesterday I specifically tried on a Windows computer to do the same with the same frames - everything is perfect, no lag.

This delay also appears in the movement of frames, components, elements.

And this brings great discomfort and unwillingness to continue working.

How to reproduce the problem:

  1. Open a file with 15-20 frames
  2. Try to move a group of 6-7 small frames.

Does anyone have such problems?

Demo video:

1 Like
2

I have an M1 Mac mini with 16GB memory, outputting to a 4k screen, and I don’t see a measurable delay in your scenario.

I do see such a delay when I drag, say, 50 large frames (e.g., 1200x1200), each containing 100 objects or more.

Are you in the Figma Mac client, or which browser are you using? Can you share the file that you video-captured?

3

Send this technical issue to the Figma support team along with the example file link https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

4

Thank you!
I still don’t understand what’s the matter. Maybe in my iMac, maybe in Figma.

Link: Figma

5

Hi!

I bet this has to do with the size of the images you imported, which appear to be gigantic, though scaled down in size. For example, I have zoom to around 3000% before I even begin to see anti-aliasing on the edges of the purple abstract shapes.

Try this: select your shapes and export at 1x (or even 2x). Then import them, replacing the images you exported.

Still, it’s disturbing that this is an issue only on an M1 mac, and not on Windows. I can confirm it’s slow on mine M1 as well.

6

By the way, I tried your file out on an Intel Mac (2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel i9) on Catalina with the same amount of memory as my Big Sur M1 (16GB), outputting to a lower resolution monitor than my M1 outputs to, and it was significantly faster on the Intel mac than the M1. Night-and-day faster, in the client or browser.

Sounds like there is further optimization to be done for the M1. Did you report this issue?

7

Yes, support sent my reports to engineers. Thank you for test!

8

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