Skip to main content
Participating Frequently
May 8, 2012
Answered

Is Illustrator CS5 performance better than Illustrator CS6?

  • May 8, 2012
  • 17 replies
  • 141988 views

There is a pretty sharp decline in smoothness of panning, zooming, dragging elements around the screen in Ai CS6.

Using both versions side by side on MacBook Pro i7, 8gb Ram, 10.6.8. Ai v16.0.0. The files are as small as 0-200k.

Ai CS6 is simply jumpy and laggy. Try a new blank artboard of 800x600 in both and drag around view at 100% zoom. The artboard skips around.

It's not unusable, but its there, and for me overshadows the improvements.

Thanks,

Brent

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer ykhatri

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the Illustrator Engineering Team.

We have been following this thread and the issues discussed here are a cause of concern for us. We have been working closely with most of you either directly or through customer support, and we have been able to fix issues that led to sub optimal performance by following some of these approaches:

     1. Creating a new user account.

     2. Clearing font cache

     3. Dumping personal cache files and repairing permissions

     4. Installing latest OS updates.

     5. Disabling beam sync

     6. Clearing any extra appearance attributes which might have applied to the artwork.

     7. Deleting any stray points in the file.

     8. Turning off some unnecessary/conflicting processes.

     9. Stopping any web streaming.

     10. Clearing unwanted mixed appearances

Since performance issues are typically hard to isolate, we would like to work with you individually to understand and isolate your issues. Most of you would have already got an email from an Adobe representative by now, and if not, you can write to us at ‘ShareWithAI@adobe.com’. 

Additionally we request you to create a new thread for each issue so that its easier for the user community to find relevant information for their issue.

Looking forward to working with you to isolate these issues.

Thanks

Yogesh

On behalf of Illustrator Engineering Team    

17 replies

AshutoshChaturvedi
Legend
May 17, 2012

Create a new user accunt on your mac login using the newly created user and see if it changes things for you. Make sure you also have the latest OS updates installed on your mahine

Participant
May 16, 2012

Noticing the same issues on my i7 iMac... panning and zoom isn't great, but worse was object manipulation compared to cs5.5. dragging objects was terribly slow. Was able to fix this object manipulation lag by disabling smart guides (cmd+U). This makes it slightly more tolerable, though it is still disappointing that the UI performance has suffered so much.

May 16, 2012

Same as me. Compared to CS5.5 everything is just a half a second too slow. Turning layers on and off just take a split second longer than CS5.5 It's not unbearable but just a tad bit annoying. Also clicking on a color in the swatches palette has not been working I have to double click it most of the time to apply a swatch.

Macbook pro i7, osX Lion. I have a feeling most of the people with problems are mac based. It's the only thing I kind of see as common throughout this thread.

45634563545
Inspiring
May 15, 2012

Another happy Windows 7 x64 CS6 user here, too.

I'm McLovin', guys!

Too bad, mac users. Sorry to hear about that.

_scott__
Legend
May 15, 2012

It's not a general Mac issue. There are many, many Mac users without the issue.

Participating Frequently
May 16, 2012

ok, lets have a little benchmark here.

open up the Natures Journey sample ai file. i'll list some of the issues im having and lets see how it stacks up.

0. open file

     how long does it take to render image completely

1. under the two characters on the left is a swirly tree. with the selection tool, select it.

     how long did it take before it was active after mouse click?

2. click and hold it and move it to the other side of the page.

     how long did it take before it started to move after your action and caught up with the cursor?

3. release the object

     how long does it take to release and redraw the screen in the new position?

4. zoom in to 200%

      how long does it take to redraw the screen in the new level of zoom?

5. undo the move of the tree

     how long does it take to redraw the screen in previous position?

6. select and move the '25years' text then select the background gradient

     how long does it take for illustrator to release the object and select the new one?

0. 250ms

1. immediate

2. 1500ms

3. 2000ms

4. 3000ms

5. 4000ms

6. 4000ms

This is with a 6Gbs ssd disk and 8gb ram i7 mbp. running illustrator on its own.

pretty much all manipulation of the viewing area is delayed considerably. you can imagine that over the course of a working day, this adds up to a staggering loss of time.

have a go at timing these tasks, you should find the sample file in your install somewhere.

mat

Participating Frequently
May 14, 2012

I have been working on a project with very large number of layers, groups and symbols and with heavy effects and appearances. CS5 was an absolute dream. quick, responsive and almost one step ahead of me. CS6 on the other hand has about 50% of the performance of CS5 using the same documents and spec and im constantly waiting for redraw and selections to catch up.

I have now tested illustrator CS6 on my practically brand new (MBP i7 8gb ram) in the following modes:

OSX

Windows (virtual machine)

Windows (bootcamp)

interestingly, it runs better on windows vm than it does natively in osx. Windows in bootcamp mode is also very performant but i just cant understand how this performance issue could slip through beta. As an advanced illustrator professional, this is very bad news indeed and will most likely cost me if it isnt addressed soon.

This is very similar to Autodesk Maya 2012 version. When is went 64 bit, it just destroyed the professional user base.

- - - - - - - - some initial performance testing results - - - - - - - - -

It would appear that illustrator is a disk hog. You can get a slightly better performance by running it on its own with nothing else. even better if you go through your processes and kill everything except what you need. This still doesnt bring it up to cs5 levels.

The worst case scenario: I have found that using spotify to play local files while using ilustrator is a complete disaster.

mat

_scott__
Legend
May 10, 2012

There must be some other force causing the poor performance. Log in as a differnt user and see if the issues go away.

May 10, 2012

Hey Scott,

Just checked it in another user login and still has the same problems. I would say the load times and things like file>new actions are way better and faster, but dealing with the layers panel issues like hiding and showing layers on and off are just slightly too sluggish.

Inspiring
May 11, 2012

I do not find that there is a delay with hide show except on files that contain veryresource intensive art.

I created such a file which I am not going to do over with CS 6 which though took about 15 seconds for CS 6 to open CS 5 could not open it before crashing. Also though hide show showed a little lag for this file when doing hide show in the layers panel I do not believe it would have been faster or even as fast if CS 5 could have open the file.

On simple files I cannot tell the difference in hide show dragging and zooming and panning are fluid for me in both CS6 and CS% I catualy see no difference thoughi  feels more fluid in CS 6 bu I am not certain if it is because I have it set to the default background color which is dark or it actually is snapper it feels snappier.

As far the Color thing I for one do not quite understand what the poster is referring to. I don't think anything has changed? Please show a screenshot of what you say is missing?

May 10, 2012

My performance has significantly decreased. Even simple things like turning a layer on and off, in CS5 it's an instant action off/on, but in cs6 there is a half a second delay. Also dragging objects has a weird jaggy motion to it. I know this is an early release, but all of these reviews that are touting all of the great performance increases seems far fetched from what I have seen. I mean I can create a new file with 2 white boxes with a black background and it feels sluggish.

Participating Frequently
May 8, 2012

The Swatches and Edit Colors panel can be added to that list.  Pantone + libraries are an absolute nightmare for production use. Attempted to work on a Pantone job and it went absolutely no where real fast.  Could type in the PMS color in the Edit Colors dialog section and searching for a color when they aren't in numbered like a production facitility would use makes it pretty much impossible to find the color easily.  Plus adjusting screen tints is a lot more difficult since it won't show the selected color below the tint slider anymore.

Participating Frequently
May 12, 2012

z284, I believe you're talking about how the program is designed and not a general performance issue which is making this thread confusing. Please make a new thread.

Also note I have no performance problems on my Windows 7 machine. Only the macbook, but its bad enough I wouldn't buy or use Ai CS6 over CS5 on MacOS.

What version of OSX are you on Wade?

Inspiring
May 12, 2012

Do not know if it help.

Here´s the system requirements for Illustrator CS6 Mac OS and Windows: http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/tech-specs.html

Even if your computer attends the system requirements..Does Illustrator CS6 look slower than CS5?

I´ve tested Illustrator CS6 in both plataforms and for me it looks faster than never.

Gustavo.