Sluggish Performance with Many Objects

Question

Hi All,
This is more of a performance survey than a technical problem. I create mostly biological illustrations so a typical illustrator file will have many individual groups or objects, such as epithelium cells in a typical segment of skin illustration. Somewhere in the order of several hundred objects and perhaps a few layers like this. My PC is reasonably beefy, built for 3D work, I'll give the specs below. Predictably, the more objects and layers I add to the canvas, the slower Adobe Illustrator becomes, with micro-stutters and pauses as I zoom in, or attempt to pan the scene. I should say, I do a lot of exporting to Photoshop to manage massive images so I know of ways to deal with large scenes, but I'm specificially curious about sub-scenes in Illustrator and if I'm working as effeciently as I can.

In 3D software, there is way to speed up scene interaction by turning many, many objects into simple 'instances', so the objects show on screen but are not directy editable in that state and as such don't slow down the rendering and interface interactions. Does any one know of a way to speed up illustrator when we have thousands of objects? Yet preserve the editability of all the layers and objects? Or perhaps don't converse the editability, I'm curious if there is any way at all to reduce lag, when the scene gets big. Thanks for any input on this.

HPZ820 dual Xeon 3.30, 16 cores total, SSD scratch, 256GB RAM, 1080Ti

ELECTROHERMIT · Accepted Answer

After checking into this for a few days, looking for solutions online, I randomly came across a possible solution after the Adobe help doc talked about using OUTLINE mode. I started nosing around under the VIEW menu at top and caught something. I assumed using the GPU would be faster than the CPU. If you go to the top menu bar of Adobe Illustrator, to VIEW, there should be a choice between "view using CPU" and "view using GPU" you toggle between the two by just clicking on CPU then it turns into GPU and vice versa. Its counter intuitive but I seem to be having faster redraw, scrolling, zooming with CPU chosen. The increase in speed seems to be double, pretty significant. I have read about this and I know Photoshop does better with GPU as its pixel based and images become massive. Illustrator is obviously vector based, so the art is being processed in the CPU then sent to the GPU for it to draw the image, but it is the CPU making the vector art. So perhaps relying on the GPU for vector isnt so fast. I have two 8 core Xeons at 3.3Ghz that turbo on single core to 4.0Ghz so its reasonable CPU speed. I have an enormous amount of RAM and I use SSD scratch drives.