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.

Nikolas, I understand your comment and I'm right with you. This is obviously a hot topic reaching right to the foundations of our daily work and it is indeed a black/white request. However they must have 'reasons'.

If Adobe choose not to implement, then that's their decision, we can always vote with our cash, perhaps that is what it will take? But perhaps product inertia brings sufficient income?

This is an interactive forum which Adobe created for discussion and is read by many of their most loyal, invested and experienced users, it's reasonable to assume that the Adobe product team also read it.
They have a perfect opportunity to understand why we need this (if indeed they actually have any difficulty in doing so) or to state why it is not to be. I don't see any competitive reason why they would not engage publically, the competition are already ahead on this. All Adobe have which keeps me a customer is the .AI file format (and using Affinity, I'm working on changing that).

In short, I'm astonished that they appear do not wish to comment/discuss on this request and the question remains "Why do they leave this idea in plain sight for 4 years without comment? "

Andy there is nothing to discus with adobe, they just need to do something and make illustrator multithreaded and add some serious GPU computing. Plain simple request, everybody else have done this already and they don't even have adobes resources.

Affinity added GPU computing in the last version and it is literally flying with the most basic GPUs.

Still the 5th -(Actually the 3rd, if completed ideas are ignored) most popular suggestion and one which will assist making some more popular ideas faster and more workable.

This idea has been under review since 2017. Could Adobe not comment on this? I'm sure we could enter into a meaningful dialogue if they wish to engage.

Meanwhile beta versions seem to be published regularly with other new features, all of which add in some way to the workload of a single core.
Since my earlier posts I have purchased and been using Affinity on the jobs Illustrator cannot handle. I'm someway along with various users and suppliers persuading them to use Affinity where editing of complex files is required.
If we have difficulties with Illustrator running slowly, then so do our customers and colleagues. At some point the industry will have to change.

Sure it doesn't happen overnight like magic.
But both Intel and AMD released their first dual cores in 2005. I had a quad core in 2007... Its 2021... This shouldn't even be a topic. Adobe should have implemented multi threading ages ago. There is simply no excuse for being this late with it.

We need multicore support. I understand that such things don't just happen like magic. At the same time, to pay such a monthly premium (a lot of money for some us) and still experience the same lag problems on even the most beastly machines is beyond ridiculous.

Just ask the guys at Serif, how to make a fast, responsive, modern design-app... Come on Adobe - it’s 2021!

Adding another voice to the crowd. There is no excuse for any application being single threaded when multiple, if not dozens, is the norm nowadays. Since Adobe CC is productivity based and an income generator for many, it is likely to be run on workstation class machines and yet the way these apps utilise available resource is from the 90's. Shame on you Adobe. Use more cores. Use more GPU power. Use more RAM. We have the hardware and your software is the bottleneck.

Why is there no comment from Adobe on this? This has been an issue for YEARS now, and is so obvious now that PC's have so many cores.

All in all I think the bigger problem is the subscription. If they had to ask for our money for each update like the old times, they should have something to show to us to make use pay again.
Now that the money flows no matter what, they don't care.

I just hope the next Updates of Affinity will make Illustrator so obsolete, that they HAVE TO completly rebuild it from the ground.

I’ve just updated Illustrator. Keen to see what has changed since the last release in October, I checked the ‘Fixed issues’ log. Half a dozen minor-ish items, three of which apply to macOs only. Of the rest:
• Incorrect URL for the Help icon in Recolor dialog
• Display of GPU out of memory error dialog when creating a new document
• Crash and stability issues
I don’t know if our in-house developer would have needed more than a day to resolve those.
And we pay £50p/m/user for this, when issues like this one, and many, many other show stopping bugs and gaps in functionality, go unresolved for YEARS?
It just looks like a very cynical cash-cow. We’ll be seriously looking at detaching ourselves from it this year.

Yes agreed, this should be the only feature to focus on. We don't need any of these useless little updates to unimportant tools. Personally being on a low income, combined with witnessing all these important issues that go unresolved for years, I am changing to affinity designer this month.

@Siwel … and don't forget Quark XPress who got far too greedy and slowed their innovating (much like Adobe is doing now), which spurred the switch to Adobe InDesign. The Affinity Suite lacks only a few functions for me to move

I am shocked when I learned that Illustrator only uses one core. And I feel violated to find out it is actually true.

Adobe if you are looking, people are complaining and talking about leaving Illustrator for Affinity. That cannot be good for business.

If this is not a sign, think about Netscape and Myspace, who were the biggest in the world but lost all their market share because they failed to innovate. Luckily at this stage, the community is only asking for optimization rather than a revolutionary move. You are still in the game. However, every corruption starts somewhere in the system. When it starts to go downhill, it will be extremely hard to pull back.

As a software engineer, I can see how difficult and how much workload involved to make it work, but I also know it is NOT going to be a full rewrite of codes as the functions and features are already there. The key is the sequential computation logic needs to become more concurrent. It is not easy but not impossible neither, but time is ticking till your competitors gain your market share.

PLEASE : this should be the next update and only update. NO MORE FEATURES TILL THIS IS COMPLETE.