A lot of effort has gone into improving the performance and speed of all aspects of Inkscape.
Oh yeah! That’s what I want to see.
This involved the refactoring of inefficient code, rewriting how Inkscape works with patterns, moving bitmap tracing into a separate thread and so much more.
Canvas rendering is now both multithreaded, and done outside of Inkscape's main process thread.
If your computer's processor has more than one core (which it most likely does), this can result in a 2–4× speedup while zooming / panning / transforming objects.