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Is Illustrator CS5 performance better than Illustrator CS6?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
May 8, 2012
17 replies
141938 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

Show previous replies

AshutoshChaturvedi

Legend

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

A

andrew34

Participant

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.

A

Anonymous

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

Another happy Windows 7 x64 CS6 user here, too.

I'm McLovin', guys!

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

_scott__

Legend

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

A

Atommat

Participating Frequently

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

A

Atommat

Participating Frequently

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

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

A

Anonymous

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.

W

Wade_Zimmerman1

Inspiring

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?

A

Anonymous

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.

Z

z284pwr

Participating Frequently

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.

V

VisualplastikAuthor

Participating Frequently

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?

A

Atommat

Participating Frequently

I am running 10.7.3 on an original Mac

And Illustrator CS 6 runbs much faster than Illustrator CS 5. For instance i do a test for each new version to see if the performancce of my computer is the same for each version of Illustrator and do a different one for Photoshop.

In my test I asked CS 5 to apply the a drop shadow to 10,000 small squares that cover an 18 x18 inche area it takes CS5 3 minutes to do it but it takes CS6 1 1/2 minutes twice as fast.

In CS6 I accidentally made a mistake the first time i tried this, and this is important, in which when making the configuration of squares I did not leave a gap between the squares which meant the squares where bigger, that time it took CS 6 2 minutes to complete the task. Still bvetter than CS 5 by 1/3 faster. However I decided to see what CS 5 would do if the sqaures were arranged the same way. well it took over four minutes but it ran out of memory and could not complete the preview where as in CS 6 I could do this again in the same document without the need to close it out but in CS 5 I would no longer be able to obtain a preview for that document no matter what I did.

That is important because it shows that CS 6 magaes memory better can access both the scratch and RAM better use more of it and is more stable. In other words it is not just the speed that couunts and is being delivered it enables you to do things that simply where not possible before.

So where you say you are having problems I say the source could well be outside of Illustrator.

For instance say access to the RAM is some how being denied to Illustrator which uses more RAM to perform the task faster and with more capability, well then perhaps that would make it not appear to be doing its job correctly. What would deny it this access to more of the available RAM I do not know. Or another thought is that you cold be using a different scratch disk for CS5 than you are for CS6 or what you are doing in CS6 is different from whyat you are doing in CS5.

But IMO this is not an equal evaluation in some form or the other. keep in mind about the RAM CS5 can only access i think it is 3GB orf RAM but CS 6 can access more if it is not getting to that RAM I would say that might curtail its performance since it is designed to use more memory.

But your Mac Book Pro should be running CS6 faster than CS5 unless of course it is configured to run as 32 bit instead of 64 bit!

In terms of general power, its great. as soon as it receives a task then the processor takes over and it does seem much quicker. What im talking about here is the speed at which the application responds to selections, screen draw, zooming, panning etc. for example, lets say I hold the space bar, thatll take a good 1-2 seconds to acknowledge and moving the display around with the hand tool will give me about 1 screen refresh every 2 seconds. Another example, double clicking on a symbol to edit it take 2 seconds in and longer to get out again.

Ive created new users, deleted prefs, reinstalled and everything. It would seem that it just cant manage large complex documents. It can crunch them sure, it just cant keep up with the pace in terms of manipulation of environment and objects. CS5 did it beautifuly.

cs6 is certainly in 64bit mode, that i know. disk usage is low, processors are practically idle, memory is freely available.

I will keep testing to isolate problem scenarios but at this point, generally, it seems a bit Beta.

any more suggestions would be gratefuly received.

mat

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