Judging from the stats you provide, it seems like it may be a CPU-related issue. (I’ve also thought about moving to other vector software which have been specifically designed for Mac OS, like Affinity Designer and Sketch, but they seem to be lacking some of the Illustrator features I rely on.) Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory.
Why is Illustrator throttled to 2% speed when it's in the background?
Or if it’s just that Illustrator performance is really slow compared to Photoshop and InDesign, and it’s an Adobe issue, according to this: Or if I just can’t expect to efficiently work on large files on a laptop, and should just switch to an iMac. I’m wondering whether upgrading to the latest Macbook Pro will significantly speed up this process. Here’s a screen recording showing how moving a group of objects takes about 10 seconds:Įdited just to add stats on Illustrator according to Activity Monitor during the screen recording: I’ve tried avoiding Overprint view, and switching to Outline view, and those help only a tiny bit. When I’m working on a large file like this, Illustrator performance is so slow, taking about 5 seconds for even the simplest operations, like zooming in and out. AI file size of one of these designs typically exceeds 500MB. I use Illustrator to create large, detailed pattern designs.
