When reference images are visible, they severely affect the canvas panning/zooming performance. On my Surface Pro 2017 I get about 40-50fps normally but only 10-15fps with reference images visible. Note that it does not really affect painting performance. The cause is probably that reference images are drawn as decorations using QPainter instead of as OpenGL textures. (Checked with Windows nightly e1569dee2f)
*** Bug 452528 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***