Just a quick question. Is the newer CGS 2018 as painfully slow as version X8?
It depends what you mean by "painfully slow".
Are you talking about the "painfully slow for certain CorelDRAW operations after the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on systems with certain graphics cards, especially AMD-based cards"?
No. I run Win7 Pro on a Dell XPS Desktop—64-bit—3.40 GHz processor—24.0 GB RAM. Both Draw and Paint are extremely slow launching, Draw especially. Starting a new document is faster but many of the operations are slow, particularly font selection. The fonts list always stalls (I use Corel Font Manager). I have to wait until it recovers to scroll again. My default printer was an Epson Stylus, but that made Draw impossible to work with so I changed the default to Microsoft Document Writer. That helped to make it tolerable. I have been a Corel user since the very start, I still have the original floppies and my version three CD, I know the software very well. The slow operations in X8 aren't just my experience, and that is the reason for my question.