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

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

That is also how I would describe my mac problem. The hand tool and panning is so jerky, you can't use it without motion sickness.

Does anyone have contact info for someone that works at adobe to investigate? There is just a generic customer service phone number and a link the forum in the help section of adobe.com

[blenblen]

Panning and moving around in Illustrator has become slower with every version in my experience. I always found this incredibly frustrating. When I switched from Windows to PC I noticed a difference in this respect as well. It's not a huge difference but CS4 on my old PC (running XP) felt more snappy for sure.

So I tried messing around with OSX's beamsync settings. I found this utility called QuartzSimple to disable beamsync on OSX. After turning this off, CS4 on my Mac feels a lottt more snappy. To illustrate the difference, try working in outline mode (with a relative simple doc) and switch back to normal mode. Panning and zooming in outline mode is just faster. With beamsync turned off it's as if I'm working in outline mode all the time which is just a lot more comfortable. It should always be like this Adobe! Especially if you're working with art that isn't too complex. 

For anyone who would like to try the QuartzSimple trick. I uploaded it to my Dropbox as I cannot find the original link anymore. As far as I know there are no risks and I've never experienced anything bad because of it (after doing this for 3 years) but don't blame me if you blow up your computer pls ; ). Just make sure to force quit the prog so that it doesn't revert back to 'automatic beam sync', otherwise you won't see any difference.

Unfortunately QuartzSimple doesn't make as big of a difference in CS6 as it does on CS4 but you should see some improvement. Depends also on your hardware specs of course. I'm running CS4 on a MacBook Pro 5.5 / OSX 10.6.8 with 8GB of ram, no external screen attached.

Download here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1091814/Various/QuartzSimple.zip

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

Thanks for posting that, couldn't find it online anywhere when someone mentioned it before.

Looks like it lowers the refresh to me. Goes from 4fps to 2fps in CS6. CS5 goes from 30 to 5. I don't have CS4 to compare though.

Anything special you did to activate it?

[blenblen]

Brent Blaskievich wrote:

Thanks for posting that, couldn't find it online anywhere when someone mentioned it before.

Looks like it lowers the refresh to me. Goes from 4fps to 2fps in CS6. CS5 goes from 30 to 5. I don't have CS4 to compare though.

Anything special you did to activate it?

Yeah, I think that was me ; ).

Run the prog, enter Tools/Beam Sync Tools and select Disable Beam Sync.

Do not quit the app, go back to Illustrator (you won't need to restart Illustrator), create a new doc with some basic graphics and move around your doc. Turn on automatic beamsync to set it back to the default behavior. You should see a difference. Do not enable Tools/Quartz Extreme. That didn't work very well for me at least. Like I said, the difference is less in CS6 than CS4 but there's still a small 'performance' difference. CS4 runs very smooth for me with beamsync disabled. As long as the art work is not too complex it feels like outline view which is nice and the way it should imo.

Also note that, if you do not want Quartz running in the background after you disabled beamsync, you have to force quit it so that the settings stick. If you simply quit it, it will revert back to automatic beamsync and you won't notice any difference.

Don't forget that when you log out or restart OSX, it resets itself to the default setting (automatic beamsync) and you have to enable it again. There's no way around this as far as I know but it's a minor inconvenience and I restart OSX rarely anyway.

This also improved perfomance in SketchUp for me btw.

[Brent_Blaskievich-SFeqPG]

Thats actually quite an improvement in CS6 as long as my viewport size is around 1440x900.

Two other monitors I've tested, 1680x1050 and 2560x1440 still run crappy when maximized as the CPU is redrawing the entire viewport, even on a blank file, with any movement like the handtool (80% usage). 

Also, I find you don't even need to make a new tab as its effective immediately.

[paulzaragoza]

For me it does drop performance, it's annoying having to work with a crippled Illustrator.

I know this is not the thread but Bridge CS6 keeps crashing and crashing, this CS6 release is not what I hoped for.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

You clearly have a cache problem and or a permissions problem and why you are not reading the article I posted I do not understand it will offer you the remedy you need but you have to read it and yes you have to do some work and if you do this it will bhe fine.

I dumped my cache because I lost some performance which I had initially gain with CS 6 but once I repared the permissions and dumped the personal cahe files all was back to normal and now that I got  my additional 8 GB of memory back so that I now have 17 GBs things are working really well.

Here is the article it is long but offers you the answers you need so you need to read and I think if you don't read it you should stop complaining because it is your own fault zI have yet to see the Bridge crash in CS 6 thought once in a while CS 5 has so this is definitely your problem.

'Here article

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/troubleshoot-unexpected-behavior-user-account.html

BTW the application frame or the number of opened panels has no effect on performance here, but then I dumped the personal cache files.

[paulzaragoza]

Actually I read the instructions for fixing this the first time you post them. And I followed them and did the work it required, in fact I installed Illustrator in other computer and fails also. For me it's not so clear even following the post. So that's why I'm still complaining.

[shanewi11iams]

I have to agree with this as I have the same issue. It stutters and only updates once you stop scrolling. My program is crashing every 5 mins. REALLY DISSAPOINTED.

[Guest]

Hey All,

At my workplace we recently switched to CS6. I tried everything I could: exploring possibility of corrupt account, cleared font cache, turned off smart guides, worked in outlines. None of it worked.

Then I found the culprit: live previewing in the following panels (any of them previewing will cause this issue) : Layers panel and Navigator panel. This is why working in outlines didn't even help because the computer re-draws all of your data live in full color for your live previews, thus eating up all your ram.

I find that there is still a memory leak in CS6 but I can live with that flaw. Minimizing/closing these panels seem to have fixed laggy issues in my office, certain key commands not working properly and "possessed" cursors.

Just turn off the panels mentioned above, hopefully you experience a vast improvement in performance. As a precaution, I also keep my following panels minimized when not needed: Artboards, Links, Appearance.

Hopefully this helps you, it certainly has benefitted the office I work at.

[Mathias17]

So pathetic . . .

Why is this not fixed yet? Are you kidding me???

[Frank Heller]

Then I found the culprit: live previewing in the following panels (any of them previewing will cause this issue) : Layers panel and Navigator panel. This is why working in outlines didn't even help because the computer re-draws all of your data live in full color for your live previews, thus eating up all your ram.

I find that there is still a memory leak in CS6 but I can live with that flaw. Minimizing/closing these panels seem to have fixed laggy issues in my office, certain key commands not working properly and "possessed" cursors.

Just turn off the panels mentioned above, hopefully you experience a vast improvement in performance. As a precaution, I also keep my following panels minimized when not needed: Artboards, Links, Appearance.

Considering how the same palette arrangement I use in CS5 (using all those you mention above) doesn't affect the performance a whit, I find this "workaround", as helpful as it is, to simply be unacceptable as far as workflow speed is concerned. Do we really need to be constantly turning on and off mission critical UI components to achieve the same performance level as the previous version? I think not.

I'm now suspecting Illustrator's Mercury Performance System implementation. Premier and After Effects took a huge screen performance hit in the initial CS6 release. Their last revision seems to have solved it. Maybe someone on the Illustrator team could call over over to the Premier/AfterEffects team and ask them what they did to improve screen performance.

[Zealous_Lightning15A8]

Hey williams,

Could you please share with us your pc/mac specs? I really want to get to the bottom of this and I cant believe how poor Illustrator CS6 is performing on my workstations. I've changed my HDD with a SSD but still the same poor performance.

I now think it may has something to do with the video card. A strange thing I've noticed in Photoshop: if Use video hardware acceleration is on, the performance is not that good. For example when I hit Ctrl+T (free transform) I have to wait about 2 seconds before I can do anything, other wise works instantly.

I use a Radeon HD3870 and also tried a Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 and the result is the same.

Maybe the two xeon cpus must br paired with a recent generation video card? Not sure if I should buy a new video card or not. I found a pretty well priced GeForce 460. But before I buy it I want to be sure I'm not spending my money for nothing.

@Galateah... I've tried turning off and minimizing all the panel and still this problem persists. It just makes me throw my workstation out the window. Cant believe it works better on my older desktop pc and there's no memory leak there. I feel the impact of the memory leak pretty hard on the workstation after about 15-20 minutes in Illustrator. Everything becomes slow and heavy.

Galateah, could you also share wih us your specs please?

[Larry G. Schneider]

Do you run with the Navigator panel open?

[Guest]

Hey dpcdpc11,

Here are my specs (copied from my sys profiler):

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name:    iMac

  Model Identifier:    iMac11,1

  Processor Name:    Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed:    2.8 GHz

  Number Of Processors:    1

  Total Number Of Cores:    4

  L2 Cache (per core):    256 KB

  L3 Cache:    8 MB

  Memory:    8 GB

  Processor Interconnect Speed:    4.8 GT/s

  Boot ROM Version:    IM111.0034.B02

  SMC Version (system):    1.54f36

Running OS 10.6.8

Our office runs off of networked accounts, I've noticed that has affected performance quite a bit too.

I just thought I'd share my two cents because   all of us in my office experienced quite an improvement in the performance of AI CS6 after turning these panels off... enough improvement so that we can actually work again. The switch had originally left us very crippled an unable to get our work done.

The way we use Illustrator is very unique because we do lots of fashion illustration with tonnes of pattern swatches, and we constantly max out our 100 artboard limit... this is why any live previewing was killing our performance speed so much. Hope that gives you a a little more insight.

We had upgraded from CS4 where having the layers panel or navigation panel open was never an issue before.

Cheers.

p.s. Making amendment, you can choose from the little drop down menu in your layers palette "Panel Options" and turn off "Thumbnails" for Layers as an alternative ... but you'd have to do this with each different/new file you open.

p.p.s. Found another preview thumbnail that seems to slow things down a little. In the "Appearance" palette.

[angelamyers]

Have you noticed any difference between files that were created in CS6 vs. files that were originally created in an earlier version and then saved as CS6?

[Guest]

Hey angelamyers,

Yes and no. For a brief period, I thought the issue was using CS4 files in CS6 but then after about an hour, quickly realized that CS6 simply has gremlins when it tries to do any live thumbnail previews. Not sure if that answers your question?

[Zealous_Lightning15A8]

Hey Galateah... thanks for sharing your specs!

One more thing... could you also tell us what video adapter are you using? I think the problems comes from the Video Hardware Accelation and the Mercury Engine which doesn't really play nice with all the graphic cards.

It's strange that there are no update neither from Photoshop or Illustrator to address this problem. Like I said in a previous post... this slow performances makes me throw my Workstation out the window and I don't think this is the best solution!

[Guest]

Hey dpcdpc11,

Does this answer your question?

ATI Radeon HD 4850:

  Chipset Model:    ATI Radeon HD 4850

  Type:    GPU

  Bus:    PCIe

  PCIe Lane Width:    x16

  VRAM (Total):    512 MB

  Vendor:    ATI (0x1002)

  Device ID:    0x944a

  Revision ID:    0x0000

  ROM Revision:    113-B9110C-425

  EFI Driver Version:    01.00.383

  Displays:

iMac:

  Resolution:    2560 x 1440

  Pixel Depth:    32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)

  Main Display:    Yes

  Mirror:    Off

  Online:    Yes

  Built-In:    Yes

  Connection Type:    DisplayPort

Display Connector:

  Status:    No Display Connected

And Oh yes, I know what you mean by wanting to throw your machine across the room.

[babygenius55a]

I don't believe all of this is still going on.  Adobe obviously did something that specifically degrades performance.  Illustrator is broken.  There should be no need to update/ugrade anything in a vector drawing program that worked wonderfully in the last version.  It feels like I'm being targeted.  And there is nothing in the program to change video settings, say, like in photoshop.

[angelamyers]

Has anyone installed the newest CS6 update that was released yesterday?  I'm wondering if that addressed any of these performance issues. 

[Frank Heller]

I'm wondering if that addressed any of these performance issues.

13 listed fixes but nothing addressing the perfomance issues discussed here.

http://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/release-note/illustrator-cs6-0-1-release-notes.html

[Zealous_Lightning15A8]

Currently testing the updated version 16.0.1 and don't see any improvements here!

I've listed my dual Xeon workstation up for selling cause I can't use it in Illustrator. I know my CPUs are a bit old but their still powerfull enough to handle a software like Illustrator but it seems AI CS6 prefers newer CPUs or something... I still don't have any explanation for my low performance in AI.

[Floatingrock]

I wouldn't sell your system, it's not the computer, it's illustrator. I have an i7 980X, 256 Intel 502 SSD, 24GB Geforce GTX690 and Illustrator CS6 still runs like a two-legged DOG!  My experience tells me it's a buggy POS, with an obvious memory leak somewhere. Added to the failure of effectively testing this application prior to release, they've now made all perpetual-licensees second class citizens. If I'm going to dump anything, it's going to be Adobe.

Here's why I'm thinking of looking elsewhere;

• Illustrator's performance is worse than previous versions and they're not too swift at fixing it.
• The help system is total crap, hasn't been fixed in two versions.
• New features (including the number one requested, file packaging) are only available to CC members, despite the fact that non-CC users pay more.

Here's the link to the Zorro file

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4415348#4415348#4415348http://

[Ironhide001]

yep, same problems persist. Navigator window crashes Illustrator if i try and use it. And there was me thinking i might actually be able to work at the speed i use to before the Nav window became such a pain.