Illustrator 2025 for new Mac Studio question.

Question

Adobe support only can parrot what is on the website for minimum requirements. I'm more interested in maximum. Can Illustrator take advantage of a M3 Ultra chip? It seems rather lame. I've got a client with very challenging label designs with overprint, lots of layers and very complicated designs. A M2 Max based Mac was marginally faster than a 2020 iMac 27"

In Geekbench 6 scores it's maybe 10% faster than a M4 Max. I would imagine the lazy programmers at Adobe only use single core and not multi-threaded designs. It certainly seems that way. I read recent release notes that the latest Illustrator was up to 10 times faster. Anybody have some experience in performance usage notes? And yes GPU function is enabled. These Macs have 32 GB RAM and no problems with memory pressure as checked with either Activity Monitor or Stats to maintain a review in the menu bar. Files are on SSDs attached to another M1 Max based file server and use 10 Gbps network. It can only be improved with a Thunderbolt 3 daisy chain to the server.

S_Gans · Answer

As far as I can see, nobody has performed any benchmark tests for Illustrator on the M3 chip. There was an independent test run by the Pfeiffer report, that spoke to significant speed increases from the Intel chip to the M1, though (https://www.pfeifferreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Creative_Cloud_on_Apple_Silicon_Benchmark_Report.pdf). If you barely felt the difference with your M2, I'm wondering if you have some background functions running that may be slowing down your Mac in general? Perhaps there are items that are taking up more than their fair share of your 32GB RAM? Illustrator uses SO much math - I've always found that my RAM measurement made a huge difference. For example, my 2020 iMac27" had 128GB of RAM, my current M1 Studio has 64GB, and in a lot of cases where math is involved (Illustrator, Photoshop filters, video rendering), I'm often feeling like it's slower - although I've never run any actual tests).

There is no indication for anyone, whether continued optimization has occurred for the increased speeds of the M series chips. I do see several reports of slow functionality of Illustrator on M3's and M4's, and I've really seen no resolution. I'd like to suggest making a Bug Report on this, using the Bug Report feature of this Community page (see attached photo).

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