In case you haven't heard, a major competitor to Adobe, which several AEC firms I know of have previously switched to at a fraction of the cost, is now totally free. And not only that, they announced this with a brand new version that appears to be amazing.
Affinity is totally free.
Also, on a slight tangent, I share some of the tools many of us use that now take advantage of your GPU (including Affinity).
Since it is free, you should just download it and try it for yourself. They created a single app that is equivalent to both Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (notice the tabs/toggles in the upper left in the image below (Pixel, Vector, Layout, Canva AI.
Here are two links from Affinity/Canva if you want to learn more:
Why we made Affinity free, and how we’ll keep it that way
And for the GPU tangent... notice Affinity leverages the graphics card if one exists in your system. (FYI: click to enlarge images).
Camtasia also uses the GPU when rendering a video. See this link for more on that: https://support.techsmith.com/hc/en-us/articles/10484374044301-Use-GPU-Encoding-With-Camtasia-Editor-Windows
Even Revit, which never used to utilize the GPU, now does, as seen in the Windows Task Manager image below (nothing else was running).
Enscape, of course, mainly uses the GPU. However, when an NVIDIA RTX-series GPU is detected, it also utilizes NVIDIA DLSS, an AI-based upscaler and anti-aliaser that improves performance and visual quality. I wrote this blog post for Enscape on this a couple of years ago: https://blog.chaos.com/enscape-nvidia-dlss-support
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