Is Illustrator CS5 performance better than Illustrator CS6?

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

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

[z284pwr]

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.

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

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?

[Gustavo Del Vechio]

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.

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

Its very fast on my Windows i7 machine, 32 and 64 versions, but the decline is on OSX. On mac I'm running 2011 MBPro, Mac OSX 10.6.8, 2 GHz intel core i7, 16GB Ram, 500+GB free space. I would say its not lacking resources, its just not optimized.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

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!

[edgeux]

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

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

I have a very different experience han you are having with CS 6 it is responding much faster I see no delay at all.

here see for yourself I have no lag of any kind

http://www.wadezimmerman.com/videos/Pan.mov

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

I also noticed especially when I did the video that the display is much better in CS 6 than any previous version and since I have an Epson 1900 printer, which is not postscript, if Icould get a good print from Illustrator CS 6 without first exporting to Acrobat and printing from Acr4obat.

Well it turns out that in fact I no longer need to save as a pdf file and print from Acrobat I can print directly from Illustrator CS 6 to my Epson 1900 and get a perfect print.

As far as I am concern I have no reason to ever use CS 5 again.

I am really happy with the idea that Illustrator now prints to my inkjet like in the old days before Apple screwed things up.

All I can sayis well done job Illustrator team and thank you.

Wade

[edgeux]

Thank you for the example but I think we're talking about 2 completely different scenarios here. Just like you, I can draw simple shapes and manipulate them as you have shown. I can also crunch large tasks quite well. The deal is... I have a document i created in cs5 that contains about 50 hi res images, hundreds(if not thousands) of objects, 20 artboard, masses of effects and countless gradient fills. At this level cs6 simply cannot deliver an experience that cs5 could.

I have since tried embedding images, saved the file as uncompressed, removed superfluous data and used the cs6 file format. This has had some success, about 25% better than before. running illustrator solo on a fresh user account also gives about another 25%, that still leaves a significant performance issue for me with documents of this kind.

mat

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

I can't believe this I have to see a video comparing CS 5 and CS 6 or I am nott buyoing it at all.

I have file that tkes CS 6 about four minutes to pen and it has over twenty thousand objects with drop shadows and it does lag when I zoom and pan but CS 5 cannot open it because it runs out of memory. I just can't believe that you even expect such a large file to perform better in CS 5 than it does in CS 6. Show us!

Not only that yousay your running such file on a Mac Book Pro I find that evne harder to believe.

[edgeux]

I find this hard to believe my self : )

Sadly i cant show you this file, its a working project file and under strict NDA.

If I can find something else to show you then I will. for now, im afraid, youll have to take my word for it.

I have ordered a SATA 3 SSD 6Gbs drive that will arrive in the next couple of days. im hoping that this might help speed things up a bit as i see more slowness when there is other disk activity, but Im not expecting much difference.

Thank you for your continued interest. I will keep this thread updated with information as I find it.

mat

[ant_tip]

VERY disappointed with screen redraw performance in Illustrator CS6. Screen redraw still uses only one processor core, so on my iMac there are three cores useless while I wait the lagging screen to redraw. No performance enhancements at all where they are most needed.

The files I'm working with are typically screen printing separations with overprinting spot color blends (must use overprint preview to view correctly) or cmyk graphics with blends and various opacities. Document sizes are typically 200 cm wide and 20 cm tall. Zooming in and scrolling is very slow... 16GB RAM, Core i5 iMac.

[edgeux]

I am now booting from SATA 3 and negotiating a 6Gbs link in the hope that this might improve scratch disk/disk activity and therefore some performance boost.  This hasnt made the slightest bit of difference other than opening and saving files.

Unusually, illustrator can now open and display the file faster than it can redraw it.

The entire mac is now really super fast, save illustrator.

mat

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

Yu know this is very hard to believe especially the part about the NDA and not being able to show it when you wrote you have lots of these files. And we have another user who also has problems on an iMac with a much smaller file which is even haarder to belive after seeing how it performs on my Old original MacPro which has a supposed much slower processor.

I just find this very hard to believe that your CS 5 is working faster wheen my CS 6 beats the living crap out of CS 5.

How do you figure it?

[edgeux]

hey, look im not here to give or receive misinformation. I appreciate you're finding this hard to believe but can you please just accept that this is a valid observation because if you dont then all youre doing is making me sound like im intentionally trying to mislead or defame, which im not.

Im am posting here because it seems the best place for people to constructively support eachother and potentially find solutions. I will continue to post findings in the hope that it will help someone else.

mat

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

Wade, what would be the purpose of three separate people lying about performance issues? We're here because we are professionals with software issues. If we knew "how to figure it" we would be posting the solution. Please only reply with useful suggestions/questions that may lead to a solution.

[z284pwr]

Has there been any discussion on whether or nothing this being an Operating System problem at this point?  It seems most of the slow performance is from users on OSX platform?  I'm running a Core i7-930 with 12GB ram on Windows 7 and have had zero observable slow downs using the 64-bit version in comparison to CS5.5.  Is the Adobe suite being developer more closely on the Windows platform and simply ported to OSX similar to Console vs. Computer video games, perhaps the OSX versions isn't as well refined as Windows?  Just a thought.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

Possibly using a different Document Raster Image Effects Setting that could make a very big difference.

Lower the raster image Effect to 72 and yiu are probably flying again and you only hsve to change it back when sending to output

[z284pwr]

The specs on some of the computers posted in here should have zero problems running a 72 vs 300 dpi raster effect.  I have always kept mine at 300 dpi.  The neckties I design are 5"x19" and CS5.5 handled them like it was nothing even with several hundred individual vector shapes and other with full 600DPI 5"x19" backgrounds.  It wasn't until I bumped these up to 12"x60" that my machine started to get upset with me.  Most of the computer specs people have posted in this thread are pretty similar so.  Then again I always have a fresh OS install with every CS version that is released so I know it's nice and clean and no garbage from previous versions causing issues.

[_scott_]

I'm guessing that the issue is due to fonts, font caches, or some other OS related issue.

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

Wade, thanks for your help, but just because you're not seeing it doesn't it mean its not there. That's like a blind person saying I see no light so there is no light. I do appreciate your help trying to figure it out, though.

Egeux, I see the slowdown on empty documents so its not even limited to complex files. What OS version are you on btw? Wade is on a new version.

[Floatingrock]

That's a pretty simple illustration, use a file that's a bit more complicated. Try the Zorro file that a person on this board posted to show the difference in performance between CS5 and 6... Even my machine that has a performance rating of 7.8 overall, 7.9 for Video and 3D stumbles on it in CS6 (Geforce GTX690 or Quadro 4000). The redraw is horrible in CS6

[Zealous_Lightning15A8]

Here's an interesting test I've managed to do on Photoshop CS6. The same results apply to Illustrator CS6 when doing CPU intensive work, for example try the experiment I've mentioned in an earlier post: create a new A3 size document and quickly zoom in and out using Alt+Scroll Wheel.

I've noticed the same CPU activity on quad i7 CPUs with HypeThreading Enabled which act like 8 cores when processing information.

This ONLY APPLIES IN WINDOWS!!!

Repeating the same test on OSX Lion 10.7.4 (hackintosh), using the same multiprocessor system (HP XW8600 Workstation) with all the 8 cores Enabled, they all work at the same time and almost at the same intensity.

So either Windows 7 is doing a shitty job at spreading the threads among the CPU's Cores, or Adobe did a shitty job at optimizing Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 (Windows Version) for 8 Cores systems. By the way Adobe Premier CS6 uses all my 8 Cores flawlessly working smooth as silk (well done Adobe!).

So I'm asking you i7 people (working in Windows) to post you're CPU activity while doing the test I've mentioned with Hyperthreading Enabled and Disabled (switch between 8 and 4 Cores) to see if we got something here!

[Floatingrock]

Window's works differently with multicore CPUs. It parks half of the available cores if they're not required. As soon as they're needed, they're activated. You can disable this functionality if you wish and reverse it using this utility..

http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-C/Disable-CPU-Core-Parking-Utility