Illustrator GPU is frequently greyed out and the performance is so slow!

[amdav]

Randomly, the GPU is deactivated while working or a few seconds after a file is opened. The file should not be heavy with many layers but it can happen in any file. Each time the GPU is stopped, the software starts working very slowly. The zoom feature and the pan and moving elements also become terribly slow. There is no way to restart the GPU because the option is gray. You can try restarting the software and if that does not help, restart your computer. It takes me a lot of time every day that I try to work. It sure is not a computer because it does not happen to me in any software. It's in the Illustrator himself. Is there anyone who knows this phenomenon there and is working on its repair?

In this screen capture you can see how suddenly after 15 seconds there is a white flash and then the GPU is turned off, and everything becomes slow.

I am using iMac 2018 with 32 GB RAM and Radeon Pro 570 4GB. macOS Mojave 10.14.3 and Illustrator 23.0.2. Please help me it's a nightmare.

[Monika Gause]

I contacted staff about your issue. Someone will need to take a look into your system.

[shawn_starc]

Try to resolve this issue by resetting the preferences of Adobe Illustrator.

Option+Command+Shift (macOS) as you start Illustrator. You are prompted to delete the current settings. The new preferences files are created the next time you start Illustrator. 

Or you can perform the below steps to do it manually

Step1.) Close all the adobe applications ( force quit)

Step 2.) Open a finder window > look for option Go > Inside Go, Choose option " Go to folder" > Type:  ~/library/ preferences in it.

Step 3.) You will find folders of Adobe illustrators settings. Rename all the folders of Adobe Illustrator by adding old into it.

Step 4.) Look for folder name Adobe > Illustrator > Rename it as Illustrator.old

Launch the AI again and check whether it resolve the issue or not. Along with it. I suggest you to validate the fonts too from Font book of your mac and check the application without internet too

[Srishti Bali]

Hi there,

Sorry about this weird error. I hope that resetting preferences as suggested by Shawn helped you. If not, please close all Adobe applications and try the following steps:

• Update GPU from AMD's website: AMD Drivers and Support for Radeon, Radeon Pro, FirePro, APU, CPU, Ryzen, desktops, laptops (do not use CD/DVDs)
• Reset preferences manually for Illustrator as suggested above.
• Restart the system and check again.

Regards,

Srishti

[amdav]

I am using iMac 2018 with 32 GB RAM and Radeon Pro 570 4GB. You can't update GPU on a Mac Srishti...

And Adobe is actually aware of that bug in all 5k screens... Too bad it's not written anywhere and I have to guess it's a bug.

[Srishti Bali]

Hi there,

I would request if you can contact us for a live troubleshooting session at Contact Customer Care. This way we will be able to look into your machine and troubleshoot accordingly.

Regards,

Srishti

[amdav]

Thanks. Since last week it says that the chat is closed. No matter which browser I use - it's not available.

[amdav]

Here is the full screenshot:

[Srishti Bali]

Sorry about that. I have sent you a personal message, please reply with the required details.

Regards,

Srishti

[amdav]

Thank you! I have to do this by chat for personal reasons... Do you know when it will be open for me?

[Srishti Bali]

It is open, however, for some reason not working for you. Did you try contacting us using a different device?

Regards,

Srishti

[amdav]

Yes. It is blocked...

[shawn_starc]

Try with different browser and clear the cache and cookies along with history. I think this will help you.

[amdav]

Thanks! I did that but it still not working. Please check this on your side?

[Om Nath Jha]

Hi there,

We do not have any such policy applied at our end and it should not be happening. Please share the URL of the support page which shows "Chat is currently closed" so that we can check more details.

Regards,

Om

[amdav]

Contact Customer Care

helpx.adobe.com/contact/support.html#solve-anchor

[Om Nath Jha]

Thanks for sharing the details. Please click on this link: Adobe Illustrator Learn & Support

Scroll at the bottom and click on "Start Now" in Contact Us option. Check the attached screenshot for more details:

Regards,

Om

[amdav]

Thanks. Still I don't understand why the link I gave you is blocked/closed. For years it was the very easy way to contact you, allowing me to tell all the details even before the agent is finally online, and then the minute he goes online he can read everything and come up with a solution.

[Om Nath Jha]

Yes, it should and I am not sure why it isn't at the moment. We're investigating it further and I'll share an update as soon as I get more details.

Regards,

Om

[shawn_starc]

Amdav, yes there is bug with 5K screen that's of the size of the menu bar and control panel's text. I don't think its a performance's bug. I am using 16 GB DDR4 Nvidia 1060 6GB GPU and i5 8600K CPU. I never experience any performance issue in my system. May I know that did you tried the steps I have shared with you to resolve this?

[amdav]

Thanks. I did the first two (preferences and fonts). The offline mode is impossible for me here. If internet connection is the reason for all my problems then it won't actually matter to me...

I will have to play around with Illustrator for a while to see if there is any difference, but in the meantime I just downgraded to cc 2017 because I am so tired of that app. I really can't understand how my desktop which is a cutting edge computer has so many issues with each and every version of Illustrator. I also work on "Sketch" app. 10s of screens, 1000s of layers - and never ever there is performance issues like in Illustrator. It's really frustrating. Thanks for the help and advice anyway! Appreciate it.

[Intermission]

I found a solution.
Turn off Real-Time Drawing and Editing in Settings.
Then it works fine.

[mr_blueeye]

I have he same problem like amdav and deactivating Real-Time-Editing does not solve it. Why are things get broken with new versions? Thats not i want to pax for!

[pentagramwookie]

Having a similar issue today, GPU performance is grayed out no matter what I do, 16" MacBook Pro 5500m GPU. macOS Catalina. Adobe Illustrator 25.2.1. Scrolling and zooming are clunky and slow with it off. 'View using GPU' stays grayed out both with 'Real-Time Editing' off and on.

Is this just an ongoing issue between Adobe Illustrator on Macs with AMD GPUs, like can this issue be avoided on Windows with an RTX GPU or on an M1 mac?

[RichardSTP]

I was having the same problem with a certain illustrator file. When I panned to a certain part of the page the screen would flash white, then the GPU could not be used to view that file. It turned out to be a problem with one linked tif image in my document. Embedding that image solved the problem for me.