Illustrator now has a bigger competitor than affinity, Blender. the different area you will say, yes, different art field but it is where creators focus goes now
Adobe should add more creative tools to their apps instead of thinking about how to make more money
I'm more and more using blender instead of illustrator, because of these performance issues, I can do serious complex art and illustrator works for primitive illustrations only

I think they will eventually release a native ARM version of illustrator for Apple Mxx processors with multi-core support but the x64 version has as much multi core support as it will ever get.

Not enough to convince me to pay for a full price subscription.

Until there is no "actual" competition, and they are de facto industry standard, they will not give a dime for better performance. Afiinity is good, but their Designer is far from actual replacement for Illustrator in production flow.

I don't buy the 'isn't possible with vectors' argument. That's just a cheap excuse. Enough vector based examples out there that seem to have no issues. It isn't possible *with the current engine* is what he really meant to say probably.

So I totally buy they'll have to do massive work on or a total rewrite of the engine and they don't want to do that.

For the price they ask and the money they make I'm sure rewriting illustrator from the ground up is not a big deal and cost next to nothing for them. They just don't care.

I think it will never happen.
Adobe worker did long explanation that multitasking isn't possible with vector and as I understood, the problem that they got to rewrite illustrator from scratch, with all its new features too, and they do not want to do it

I have been waiting over 25 minutes for a rendering - watching hardware utilization of only 5.7% CPU, 0% GPU and 15% memory on a Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core processor with one core engaged and an RX 6800 GPU that is totally unutilized by Adobe. I am trying to put a shaded symbol of a label onto a vectorized can - lots of opportunity to exercise core and especially GPU capabilities.

Adobe has lots of performance tips that are completely irrelevant in this situation - the computer system is not maxed out, it is literally 98% not-used, because of obsolete application code.

In 2021 there is no excuse for this level of obsolete performance from the supposed graphics leader. We have about nine months before our annual paid subscription expires and I will move our company off of Adobe if things have not changed dramatically at renewal time. This is too high a cost in time to justify.

I will take the time waiting for it to render (now up to 40 minutes) to look at Affinity as I have seen many favorable comments about it recently.

Don't forget, you get to pay a monthly premium for this advanced level of service. With the extra money, they can do regular updates and releases providing their customers with superior products. As well as lots of software they don't use and updates that make no difference to them. Oh, and I almost forgot this beauty!... Change the way the software works with the updates so you have to learn it all over again AND make different command functions between each of their various programs (for the same function) so you can easily get confused when flipping between programs. Glad I get to pay a premium for that service!

M1 and Ryzen 5XXX are tearing in single core performance. I don't say this is enough or acceptable, just that maybe adobe will rest their case with that.

Hmmm, this really doesn't feel like a superior performance, watching Illustrator struggling along on one core, while my other eight cores are doing nothing.

@Oskar I'm afraid the superior per core performance will be another reason for Adobe not to care.

In PC we can only get this level of single core performance only from Ryzen 5600X and abode for now.

One thing I wonder is if there will be or is already multi core support with the new M1 (and upcomngin M2?) support that they just released.

Ah you guys must be new here :P I don't expect it to be addressed before 2027, maybe even longer.
At least if they don't care about illustrator they can lower the price to something like 5$ per month...

Under review since September 12, 2017?! Obviously, this isn't a priority over building horrible ARM applications that mess up other platforms.

This thread is under review since what? 2017? Are you kidding me.
2017 there were already processors which could handle 8 parallel processes, we have 2021 now and the processors can handle 32 parallel processes easily.
But I have to wait over night to render out some assets. Watching my task manger reminds me of German road construction, 1 guy is working and the other 15 are watching peaceully. At least I can watch render a movie on the other processors in the mean time.

Updated system to an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X + Gigabyte B550 Vision D + 64 Gb 3200mh memory + Samsung SDD 950 Pro + Reinstall windows 10 system and Adobe software and Illustrator is still as slow as ever. My recommendation: Do not update your system if you want to increase the speed. My old system: X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC + AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X - Memory Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 / 3000MHz 32GB

Oh my lord. I just downloaded Affinity Designer to try it out. It's fantastic. While it's definitely not as feature rich as Illustrator, it performs SOOOO much better that it's worth not having the shortcuts that those Illustrator features provide. It's clean and modern and FAST. It makes Illustrator look like a really antiquated piece of software. What a shame.

Whilst it may seem that Adobe is ignoring this topic, in fact, some of the latest versions of Illustrator appear to have some multithreading capabilities for certain tasks. I noticed when I applied a blur to a vector image with 1000s of complex paths by mistake, the app became unresponsive, so I checked Activity monitor and Illustrator was utilising all 4 cores. I tested some other tasks like saving a massive file and 3d filters but they still only used one core..

Nikolas Karampelas actually Affinity is already 85% better than Ai!
If in Affinity they implement a dozen things that are wrong or not yet in Ai, the passing en masse is almost safe.

Better type of guide management, selection channels view, overprint, circle design passing through 3 points, shape builder, script extensions, etc. and bye bye Illustrator.

We have a saying here for when you have the animals chained on the cart they won't go anywhere.

Same with adobe, they believe they have us chained on illustrator because it is an industry standard by now, but they forget that even quark xpress was an industry standard and failed to deliver and ultimately lost to indesign.

I stopped using illustrator once I started my freelance career, it just doesn't worth the cost now that I'm asked to pay this myself and at the same time the only way for it to work better is for me to pay even more money to buy newer and newer and newer hardware with little improvements because the rest of the world have moved on with multicore and GPU computing and the per core improvements are just a small cog of any machine now.

The only reason I'm here complaining is that I really want this program to improve and even return using it if it get better (or I don't know, stay like this and reduce the price and I could keep it around for smaller things?), I don't want my years of experience with illustrator to go to the way of the Adobe Flash.

That being said I make my money with affinity right now and as long as I can export PDF files for printing nobody complains for anything.