figcraft/docs/hardware-parity.md

Hardware and platform parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-30 · Change: minor (the portable Windows zip keeps its settings, recovery copies and plugins in config\ beside the executable, starting with an installed copy's preferences; the window starts on other graphics when its first ones fail before the first frame: Direct3D 12 compiles with FXC and no device compiles wgpu's indirect-validation shaders, then Vulkan, OpenGL and lower requirements on the power-saving GPU (#965, #1438); large images on the canvas draw from a smaller copy, so two 16k images no longer lag (#1483); macOS: the Quit menu and ⌘Q ask about unsaved changes (#857); egui/eframe 0.37 dependency migration; hidden-window screenshot deadlines; zoom previews; hidden windows answer control requests; macOS file opening, the Windows start-up message, Linux packaging; copy and paste in the browser; Windows QA pass; Display P3: gamut warning and soft-proof (true P3 blocked upstream); several windows; pen pressure for the Pencil and brushes on Windows and from browser styluses; macOS: quitting ends the process once everything is kept, avoiding the Touch Bar teardown crash (#781); Linux and BSD clipboard: images under Wayland, reads time out; minimised windows under Wayland; window controls on Wayland without server decorations; canvas textures on device pixels; copy and paste in the browser; Windows QA pass; Display P3: gamut warning and soft-proof (true P3 blocked upstream); several windows; pen pressure for the Pencil and brushes on Windows and from browser styluses) · Target: Figma Design (desktop app 126.10.7)

How FigCraft uses hardware and which platforms it runs on, against Figma. Figma's desktop app is Electron with a GPU helper process; its canvas renders on the GPU (WebGL, with WebGPU rolling out since 2025). FigCraft renders the canvas on the CPU and presents it through wgpu.

Summary (estimated): hardware ~60%, performance ~60%, platforms ~75%.

Hardware

Feature	Figma	FigCraft (macOS / Windows / Linux / web)	Hours
Canvas rendering	GPU	CPU (tiny-skia), banded across cores, retained (re-renders only what an edit or pan touches), levels of detail below 50% zoom, large images drawn from a copy no larger than they show (#1483); when renders from scratch are slow, a new zoom shows the whole view coarsely first, then refines it (#312); shown through wgpu (WebGPU or WebGL2 in the browser)	30–60 for a GPU path
Effects (blurs, glass, noise)	GPU	CPU	in the above
HiDPI / Retina	yes	yes (all); a canvas image rendered at the screen's density is placed on whole device pixels, so fractional pans, zooms and display scales don't blur it (#359; geometry tests, the snapping not judged by eye)	—
Wide-gamut display (Display P3)	yes, on capable displays	colours stored and exported in P3; the screen shows sRGB: eframe/egui-wgpu 0.37 configure an 8-bit sRGB surface with no colour space option, although wgpu 30 can present Display P3 or extended sRGB on Metal, DX12, Vulkan and WebGPU (see gaps #18). The colour picker warns about colours outside sRGB and View ▸ Soft-proof sRGB stripes them on the canvas	2–5
Trackpad pinch zoom and two-finger pan	yes	yes (egui zoom delta, smooth scroll)	—
Pen tablet pressure (pencil, Figma Draw brushes)	yes (forum reports of regressions in 2025)	Windows pens (winit pointer input) and browser styluses that send touch events with a force (an Apple Pencil in Safari); the Pencil records it as the stroke's width profile. A mouse, macOS and Linux tablets and pens sending only pointer events in a browser report none: constant width	1–3
Several windows / multi-monitor	yes (a window per file; presenter in its own window)	desktop: File ▸ New window, a tab's Open in new window or a tab dragged off the strip; each window has its own tabs, panels and canvas, draws only when it needs to and asks about unsaved changes when it closes; a minimised or covered window still answers control and MCP requests, while screenshots with hidden or unknown visibility request a hidden paint and expire at their 60-second admission deadline if unfinished; injected pointer/key/text input waits for a real UI frame (#313, #332, #720). Browser and Wayland hidden-paint behavior remain unqualified. Only the main window has a screen-reader tree (eframe 0.37), so files stay tabs while a screen reader runs; positions aren't restored at the next start; the presenter stays inside its window; one window in the browser	1–2
Screen readers	partial	AccessKit tree on desktop (names, roles, states), never tested with a real screen reader; none in the browser	4–8 + human QA
Keyboard layouts (non-US)	yes	keymap uses logical keys; not checked on AZERTY/QWERTZ/JIS	1–2

Performance (measured by cargo xtask bench, synthetic files, owner's Mac)

Case	FigCraft	Figma
50k-layer page, zoomed out, full render	~8 ms (levels of detail)	not timed side by side
10k layers: full 1440×900 render	7–15 ms	not timed
10k layers: move one layer, re-render	~0.2 ms	not timed
Design system of ~300 components × 2,000 instances: recolour a main used ~900 times	4–18 ms	not timed
.figcraft at 50k layers: save / load	~0.09 s / ~0.16 s	n/a
Idle window	0 frames, ~0% CPU	—

Nothing has been timed against Figma on the same document (needs .fig import).

Platforms

Platform	Figma	FigCraft	Notes
macOS	desktop app (Intel and Apple silicon)	universal .dmg, signed and notarized (v0.2.0)	where nearly all QA happens. Quitting ends the process once the preferences, recovery copies and live sessions are taken care of: the window's teardown crashed on Macs with a Touch Bar (#781); the Quit menu and ⌘Q ask about unsaved changes like the main window's close button (#857), and like it close the main window only: with several windows open, each quit closes one; a quit that never asked — killed or crashed — still leaves recovery copies for the next start
Windows x64 / arm64	desktop app	.msi and portable zip for x64, x86 and arm64	built in CI; Windows: QA pass done 2026-10-11, findings in PR. The portable zip keeps its settings in config\ beside figcraft.exe (a portable file there), taking an installed copy's preferences on its first start (#1320)
Windows x64 / arm64	desktop app	.msi and portable zip for x64, x86 and arm64	built in CI; Windows: QA pass done 2026-10-11, findings in PR. Draws with Direct3D 12 (FXC shaders) or OpenGL; when the graphics fail before the first frame it starts again on Vulkan, then OpenGL, then the power-saving GPU with lower limits (#965)
Linux	none (browser only)	AppImage, .deb, .rpm, Flatpak, tarball, x86_64 and aarch64; riscv64 tarball	CI tests run here. Clipboard (also the BSDs): reads run on a helper thread that gives up after 2 s, and images copied in other apps paste under Wayland through the data-control protocol (#693). Under Wayland the app can't tell its window is minimised, so control requests that need a drawn frame may still wait there (#720). None of this run on a Linux desktop here. On a Wayland compositor without server-side decorations (GNOME) the window gets winit's Adwaita controls (#592: checked by its author in a GNOME Wayland session; KDE not run)
FreeBSD	none	tarball
Web	primary (figma.com)	figcraft-web (WASM, WebGPU/WebGL2), web zip	no accessibility tree; file access through the browser; copy and paste through the system clipboard (copies written from the copy event, pastes read from the paste event; no pasting images from other apps)
iOS / Android	apps: view, comment, mirror prototypes	none (the web build is not touch-first)	20–40 h for a viewer

Revision history

Date	Change	Summary
2026-10-30	minor	M1, #1320: settings in portable mode. The settings folder now comes from craft-settings, the suite's rules: FIGCRAFT_CONFIG_DIR names a folder (set but empty: none, nothing read or written); a portable file next to the executable (next to the .app on macOS) puts the preferences, recovery copies and installed plugins in config/ beside it; otherwise they stay in FigCraft in the platform folder, where every earlier version kept them, so nothing moves for an installed app. The Windows portable zip now ships the portable file. A portable folder without preferences yet starts with a copy of the platform folder's state.json (owner-only, the original left for an installed app), so a portable copy that kept its settings in %APPDATA% before keeps them after the update. Checked on Windows 11 with a portable copy beside an installed copy's settings: the first start took them (its name and start screen), a name changed there was kept in config\ only, and without the marker the app read the installed settings again. Tests: settings_dir_tests. Numbers unchanged
2026-10-30	minor	M1, #965, #1438: "Parent device is lost" at start. Both reports lost the device while wgpu compiled its indirect-call validation shaders, which it builds with every device: on Windows Direct3D 12 took another program's dxcompiler.dll from the search path and failed without its dxil.dll; Intel Macs' Metal compiler aborts on them. Direct3D 12 now compiles with FXC (part of Windows; WGPU_DX12_COMPILER still chooses), and the validation shaders are left out (FigCraft draws nothing indirectly; WGPU_VALIDATION_INDIRECT_CALL turns them back on). When the graphics still fail before the window's first frame, the app starts itself again with the next attempt, from a fixed list: on Windows Direct3D 12/OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenGL, then the first again on the power-saving GPU with WebGL2-level device limits; on Linux and FreeBSD the defaults, OpenGL, then lower requirements; on macOS the defaults, then lower requirements. The last failure's message names what was tried; the log names the backend and GPU that drew. WGPU_BACKEND is still the one attempt. A restarted app waits up to 5 s for its --control port. Checked on Windows 11 with a local build that made the first one, two, three and then all four attempts fail: each fallback opened the window (Vulkan, OpenGL, Direct3D 12 on the integrated GPU) and four failures ended with the message. Not run on the reporters' machines or on macOS. Tests: graphics_tests, startup_tests. Numbers unchanged
2026-10-29	minor	Large images on the canvas (#1483): an image shown smaller than its pixels draws on the canvas from a copy scaled down to 4096 or 8192 px on its longer side, the smallest that holds what the screen shows (figcraft_render::images::shown), cached beside the image itself in the same 512 MB budget. Two 16 000 × 10 000 images took 640 MB each and evicted each other on every frame that drew both; as copies they take 80 MB together zoomed out and 336 MB at 8192. Moving one over the other went from about 2.1 s a frame to 11 ms zoomed to fit and 15 ms at 30% in the app (debug build). Closer than that, and for tiles, the canvas draws from the image itself, so 100% and closer stay sharp; a view of both at 100% still takes about 2 s a frame, and an image with shadows still decodes in full for them. Exports, thumbnails and every other render are unchanged. Tests: large_image_tests. Numbers unchanged
2026-10-29	minor	macOS quit confirmation (#857): winit's default Quit menu item (⌘Q) ended the process through AppKit's terminate: at once, so a dirty app died without asking anything. The app now installs the craft-libs app menu (craft-menu): its Quit sends the main window a close request — the same path as its close button — so the unsaved-changes question asks before anything is lost (windows_tests::a_quit_with_unsaved_changes_waits_for_the_answer; checked in the app on macOS). Like the close button it closes the main window only, so with several windows open each quit closes one. A second quit before the window draws again (two quits while it is minimised, when only the app's logic runs) counts once: before, it could quit the app over another window's unsaved changes (windows_tests::quitting_twice_before_the_window_draws_closes_it_once). Numbers unchanged
2026-10-25	minor	egui/eframe 0.37 dependency migration: the workspace pins the egui family at 0.37, and the wide-gamut and several-windows rows now cite 0.37. The limitations are unchanged: egui-wgpu 0.37 offers no surface colour-space option, so the screen still shows sRGB; eframe 0.37 still gives only the main window an AccessKit adapter, so files stay tabs while a screen reader runs. Numbers unchanged
2026-10-25	minor	Hidden or unknown-visibility screenshots request a hidden paint and expire at their 60-second admission deadline if unfinished; injected pointer/key/text input waits for a real UI frame. Browser and Wayland hidden-paint behavior remain unqualified. Numbers unchanged.
2026-10-15	minor	Community fixes (#290, #306, #312, #313, #328, #332, #346, #474): coarse zoom previews when renders from scratch are slow; a minimised or covered window answers control and MCP requests (screenshots and input fail at once while it is hidden); .figcraft files open from Finder on macOS; a message box when the window can't open on Windows; on Linux the window id matches the desktop entry, the RPM requires glibc 2.35 and user fonts under XDG_DATA_HOME are found. Numbers unchanged
2026-10-18	minor	macOS quit crash (#781): on Macs with a Touch Bar the app could crash as it quit (an exception in AppKit's Touch Bar support while the window's content view, which the accessibility adapter subclasses, was torn down). Quitting now keeps everything (preferences, this run's recovery copies, live sessions ended) and then ends the process before that teardown. Quit from the menu bar ends the app without the unsaved-changes question, so unsaved files' recovery copies now stay and reopen at the next start instead of being removed. Numbers unchanged
2026-10-17	minor	Linux row: clipboard reads on Linux and the BSDs time out after 2 s on a helper thread, images copied in other apps paste under Wayland (arboard's data-control feature, #693), a minimised window can't be detected under Wayland, so frame-only control requests may still wait there (#720), and Wayland compositors without server-side decorations give the window Adwaita controls (#592, checked by its author on GNOME, not by the maintainers; KDE not run); compiled in CI, not run on a Linux desktop. HiDPI row: native-density canvas images placed on whole device pixels (#359, geometry tests; not judged by eye). Numbers unchanged
2026-10-14	minor	Copy and paste in the browser: the web build never wrote to the system clipboard, so Cmd+V after Cmd+C pasted whatever text the clipboard held before (as a text layer) instead of the copied layers. Copies (layers, Copy as SVG/CSS/text/PNG, links) now go out through egui's output, which eframe writes during the copy event (web_clipboard_tests). Numbers unchanged.
2026-10-11	minor	Windows QA pass (gap 8): everyday workflows on Windows 11 through the desktop app and MCP; fixed: unsaved changes lost when the app was killed or crashed (recovery copies every few seconds, reopened at the next start), Ctrl+arrows/Backspace/Delete acting on the whole line in text (now by word; Ctrl+Home/End to the text's ends), scrubbed fields snapping back on release, typing on a field Tab reached, Escape not closing dialogs, skewed or vanishing linear gradients, hints cut off at the panel edge, the window-close question in English in the Spanish interface. Percentages and hours unchanged
2026-10-11	minor	Display P3 honest minimum (gap 18): the colour picker of a Display P3 file warns when a colour is outside sRGB (Outside sRGB, with what the canvas and exports do), and View ▸ Soft-proof sRGB (view.proofSrgb) stripes the canvas pixels sRGB can't show. Why the canvas still shows sRGB: wgpu 30 can present Display P3 or extended-range sRGB surfaces (Metal, DX12, Vulkan, WebGPU canvases), but eframe/egui-wgpu 0.36 configure an 8-bit sRGB surface with no option for the format or colour space, and egui's renderer writes sRGB-encoded UI colours; showing P3 needs those two upstream (or a patched egui-wgpu). Hardware 13–27 h → 12–26 h; gap 18 6–12 h → 5–11 h; percentages, feature breadth (~79%) and ready for real work (~47%) unchanged at this rounding; full parity ~363–697 h → ~362–696 h
2026-10-11	minor	Several windows (gap 18): File ▸ New window, a tab's Open in new window or a tab dragged off the tab strip opens files in another window with its own tabs, panels and canvas, sharing the files, preferences, libraries and clipboard; each window draws only when it needs to (idle: ~0% CPU), closing one closes its files after asking about unsaved changes (the main window too, which takes over another window instead of quitting; the last window quits), and the control channel and MCP open, list, focus and capture windows (window.new, window.list, window.focus, window on any request); the screen-reader tree covers the main window only (eframe 0.36), so with a screen reader running files stay tabs; one window in the browser. Hardware 55% → 60%, 13–27 h → 10–21 h; gap 18 6–12 h → 4–8 h (P3 on screen left); feature breadth (~79%) and ready for real work (~47%) unchanged at this rounding; full parity ~363–697 h → ~360–691 h
2026-10-11	minor	Stretch and scatter brushes and pen pressure landed (gap 9): eight brushes drawn in code (four stretched along the path, four scattered with spacing, size, rotation and scatter jitter from a seed) in the stroke settings, drawn everywhere strokes are and flattened by outline stroke; the Pencil records pen pressure as the stroke's width profile (Windows pens, browser styluses; macOS and Linux tablets report none) and can draw with a brush; Figma Draw extras breadth 45% → 65%, ready 30% → 45%, 10–18 h → 5–9 h; Strokes 2–4 h → 1–3 h; Hardware 50% → 55%, 15–30 h → 13–27 h; feature breadth (~79%) and ready for real work (~47%) unchanged at this rounding; full parity ~380–725 h → ~375–715 h
2026-10-10	major	Created from the 2026-10-10 re-measure