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tallscot
Inspiring
November 14, 2017
Answered

Does Illustrator Use Multiple Cores?

  • November 14, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 21158 views

I'm running the latest Adobe Illustrator on a Mac Pro with 8 cores and it's a large print image I'm creating with a drop shadow. It's taking several minutes to render the drop shadow on this system and I'm just curious if there is a setting to make it utilize all the cores, etc? Because this is reminding me of the 1990s.


Thanks!

      This topic has been closed for replies.
      Correct answer Monika Gause

      nitro912gr  schrieb

      Please whoever is listening from adobe, I know those programs are old, but do something to make them faster. I don't know what, rewrite them if you have to make them work better in modern hardware, I know you can.

      Post to http://illustrator.uservoice.com

      3 replies

      J
      jonathanc97279208
      Participant
      March 11, 2019

      I agree that Illustrator could be much faster than it is now. I use it on my personal MacBook Pro and a Windows desktop and laptop at work. While both Windows installations perform slower than the Mac installation all have speed issues. I don't know if the answer is for it to be modified or re-written to use multiple threads or for it to utilize operating system tools like Metal for Apple operating systems, but whatever the solution is, I hope that Adobe will improve this soon. Waiting several minutes to move objects, render effects and save files in Adobe Illustrator seems excessive.

      H
      henry_denovo
      Participant
      August 8, 2018

      Ok, here's my build:

      CPU: Intel Xeon 4669v3 18-Core

      GPU: Titan V

      RAM: DDR4 64GB

      SDD: M.2 NVMe 500GB

      I do genomics. I do prefer Illustrator for editing figures, and based on my build, I should be able to select and delete a million objects rather quickly, right? Nope. The struggle is real. Even with GPU acceleration! Maybe I need a Quadro (or maybe I just need to spend more time coding my figures, lol).

      I love Illustrator, but damn, I hate the bottlenecks!

      *Adobe should really add a plugin to maximize Illustrator peformance based on user build.

      J
      janhlange
      Participating Frequently
      February 2, 2020

      Nope (high end) Quadro doesn't make it much faster.   The upside is I can work on other crap while I wait.  Even with Illustrator locked up working hard, it only gets my cpu usage up to 10% adding for instance a really tight scribble effect to a very large image trace.   Its not the hardware it's the algorithms. 

       

      Equipment: Dell t7920 Workstation Dual Xeon Gold 20 core = 40 cores total  (80 logical cores)  256gb ram  all nvme drives, Nvidia Quadro gv100 32gb video ram.  

        R
        Rolando_RT
        Participating Frequently
        February 8, 2022

        Now, 2 years after this post, Still looks like only 1x core utilised. 

        Flattening a 10m x 3m artboard to raster, hangs not responding but still only utilising 1 core (8% CPU) and 5GB of ram (out of 128GB) with Zero use of GPU on the Quadro A4000. Massive computer just idling with 1 Cylinder burning out while the rest just do nothing...such a pity. And unlike your example, It does drastically slow up all other apps, it's like maxxing one core forces task manager to throttle the others, meaning parallel work on other programs grinds to a near halt...c'mon Adobe 😞

         

          Ray Yorkshire
          Ray Yorkshire
          Participating Frequently
          November 14, 2017

          I remember reading this article  a while ago; not sure if the drop shadow creation runs into the same problem

          Can batch processing on Adobe Illustrator be made any faster using multiple cores of the CPU or GPU?

          Mordy Golding, worked at Adobe Systems

          Answered Dec 8 2015

          Vector graphics have their advantages and disadvantages. This, sadly, is one of the downsides. That's because vector graphics are drawn in a linear stacking order.

          Take one simple example -- take a single layer with a single rectangle. Duplicate that layer 100 times. Even though only the top layer is visible, illustrator draws each rectangle from the bottom most layer to the top. Illustrator can't draw layer 50 until the previous 49 are done. This is unlike photoshop that is just concerned with which pixels are ultimately visible.

          Extending the concept further. Say you had 4 cores. You could take a photoshop file and split it into a grid of 4 areas and tell each core to draw 1 area -- all at the same time. That's because a pixel in one grid has no impact whatsoever on pixels in another grid area. Since you can split a photo into multiple independent areas, you can assign multiple cores to render each area simultaneously.

          However, in illustrator, each object is drawn in the order it appears in the stacking order. So if I split an image into a grid of four, I still have to build all art object by object no matter what grid it is in. Meaning all 4 cores would still have to wait until all objects were drawn before rendering.

          What this means is that only some kinds of functions can support multi-core functionality in Illustrator. For example, if you print a large file, illustrator will hand the print spooling off to another core and return you back to your document to continue working immediately. But sadly, this isn't possible for speeding up linear tasks like drawing/rendering art.

          Can batch processing on Adobe Illustrator be made any faster using multiple cores of the CPU or GPU? - Quora

            N
            nitro912gr
            Participant
            June 6, 2018

            This doesn't make much sense to me. Any program no matter what it does have some operations to complete and those operations can be split for efficiency, even if that means to use 1 core to manage this splitting.

            Cutting the screen and give a part to each core to render do make sense but still why the vector rendering can't be multisourced?

            So if we have that 50 vector objects to render the program should send 1 object to each core and not have 1 core to render each one of them on it's own.

            We are in 2018, I have seen other programs utilize more cores for vector graphics so it is possible to be done. I have my 6 core CPU for ages now but most of the cores just stay there idle. This is unacceptable, especially since we are in a somewhat stagnant CPU environment that up until now that AMD got those ryzens out, we could barely get 5-10% better CPUs from Intel, so it is not like we can just upgrade the hardware (which financially doesn't make much sense if the software can be better).

            Please whoever is listening from adobe, I know those programs are old, but do something to make them faster. I don't know what, rewrite them if you have to make them work better in modern hardware, I know you can.

              Monika Gause
              Community Expert
              Monika GauseCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
              Community Expert
              June 6, 2018

              nitro912gr  schrieb

              Please whoever is listening from adobe, I know those programs are old, but do something to make them faster. I don't know what, rewrite them if you have to make them work better in modern hardware, I know you can.

              Post to http://illustrator.uservoice.com

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