In terms of GUI interaction speed and input latency, Zed imho is better. Just see for yourself the first 2 minutes of their showcase video [1]. They have written their own abstraction layer (GPUI) over Apple's Metal (I'm not sure whether that is portable to Vulkan, DirectX 12 or not). And what is Emacs's most performant rendering backend? PGTK is recently gaining traction.
I haven’t tried hard with Zed because last time I took a serious go at it (roughly 4-6 months ago) it didn’t have a great story for remote machines.
If you’re doing production work, sooner or later your laptop won’t have the same GPU as the target. At that point an editor without a remote facility becomes an accessory.
If you’re on a Mac, there is an NVIDIA target these days. You have to be able to edit code next to the card.
