I find it interesting that they continue to add 3D support and features but won't fix the core performance of the program. 3D is going to require more CPU and not less so seems like you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

It's painful that this hasn't been implemented yet. It's hugely critical to performance. Working on any projects with large raster images is tiresome. Seeing that this was posted in 2017 gives me very little hope.

I started rasterizing my 4x4-inch black and white artwork at 300ppi about 20 minutes ago. I had the rainbow wheel of death for a good 5 min before the progress bar indicating it started rasterizing showed up. Meanwhile, my total CPU usage is hovering around 12% usage the entire time and Illustrator is unresponsive. I'm running a 3.8 GHz 8-core i7 with 40GB of ram for crying out loud. Sure the artwork is complex, but 20 minutes for something so small and only one color without any custom transparency effects, and it's STILL processing. Feels like I'm using an old G5. (Edit: I eventually force-quit after 30min as it was still processing)

@AJ, I'm sure it's the accountants who are running the show now. Like so many company before, they will use the same business model. Bleed it dry until it dies then maybe hire some big shot to bring it back to life in it's final breathe. In the meant-time, release a few useless updates to make it look like they're doing something. I'm sure they understand perfectly well.

Yes, I feel all the same frustrations.
The potential to pinpoint edit colour and form in Illustrator in its current state is completely hampered by Adobe's lack of action.
Adobe's focus on 3D and other icing sprinkles functions without building on the program's fundamental usability is unbelievable after 5 years of waiting with no progress on this.
For digital artists is impossible to make certain sorts of perfectly feasible artwork in the current state of this program because we are stuck in a 1990s time slip without multi thread foundation.
Why are we still waiting on this half a decade down the road?
Adobe is a resource rich company.
Is it engineers who do not actually understand the creative potential of the program? Is it sales departments mangers who have no experience of using the program to its full potential. Or it is simply a cold disregard for end users who have asked time and time and time again for action on this?
When it works I love Illustrator but like others here I am tiring or paying for a subscription to a company that will not support or listen to its creative users. If Adobe made Illustrator more baseline solid think of the superlative artwork that could actually be rendered. think about it Adobe: you could showcase that work and make more sales. How about fixing these basic performance issues, Adobe – please?

Has i pointed out in a call with them back in 2018. at least have a core dedicated per project file. this way if i open more than one file it will not crash me when just doing a task has simple has copy and past. yes i have that experience still to this day. opening more than one file or having a menu brochure that has more than 600+ lines of text and Ai crashes form a copy and past. More ram helps but having Multi core support will be the best fix.

Well, it goes without saying that Mama Adobe doesn't really care much about taking care of her beloved children (they once were).
I would propose (even if it is of little interest to mommy), to devote more energy and effort to improving the obsolete architecture of her software (software that runs on codes written and implemented for at least 30 years), taking care to improve performance such as USE of the CPU, RAM, GPU and spend less time implementing small new features that often are of little use, actually are of little use.
Example they insert a whole part dedicated to 3D, but then this 3D consumes enormously CPU / GPU / RAM resources but the architecture still thinks in single core so to work easily with 3D is a disaster because everything is very very very SLOW and the 'user probably that "amazing" function will never use it because it is slow and wastes precious time, then illustrator stops and you waste more time!

Sincerely, I am a former Freehand User, with many BUGS that had that software you worked easily without lag (with much much slower machines, we are talking about 2003/2005 (almost 20 years ago)) and yet I did everything with that software, now Illustrator I use it for small things, brands or vector icons, for the rest I try to do everything with InDesign, at least it is more stable and faster. Illustrator is so heavy, even with a few boards, it is also imprecise in snapping to paths, it worked best freehand with its snap on nodes or it automatically adjusted to the curve of the path.
I tried Affinity Design, and I have to say it's about snaps, multicore speed, CRAZY zoom 1.000000000%
IT IS REALLY SCARED, if those of affinity would improve a few things present in Illustrartor, believe me for the proposed cost and the fluidity and speed of that software, they will pass en masse to Affinity.
But maybe that's what Adobe expects since it doesn't do anything to improve its software. Only new SIPERFLUE features.

How do you think about it?

@Stuart Chesters
I have switched over to affinity, I had the programs day one but had to spent some time to get used to them and there are some missing things here and there. As a freelancer it doesn't make any difference since I hand out PDF files anyway.

But version 2 is said to be around the corner for Designer and I hope they will add more of what is missing.
For example there is no text warp and no image trace.

Also I want to dispel a small misinformation here, the programs are not 100% multitreaded BUT, they are clearly way faster as they are written from scratch and take advantage of modern hardware in ways illustrator can't because of the old bits of code in there.

That being said most of the time I see more cores to engage in something and they have also added GPU computation to help with rasters. When I see most of the work is on exports tho, many times I see my CPU getting that sweet 100% on all 6 cores/ 12 threads, although it is fast enough to see it for seconds and mostly if you have rasters in the design.

Again, no matter what the program is way faster than illustrator and it shows mostly on older hardware.

@Stuart Chesters
Yeah, Affinity Designer is looking mighty good right about now. I've been waiting 10 minutes for a rather simple process to complete in Illustrator. I'm part of a small outfit, so our cancelling the Creative Cloud subscriptions will only cost Adobe about $1200 a month. Still, considering the number of votes for this feature, a lot of other people must be getting pretty fed up, too. I'm going to buy Designer for personal use tonight and see what the learning curve is. Affinity Publisher seems pretty nice, (I bought it about 2 years ago, and have played around with it a bit) so I am expecting good things. It'll be a pain not working in native ai files, but I can put up with an eps workflow.
It's painfully obvious by this point that the people who write this software don't actually have to use it on a day-to-day basis. I had an embarrassing experience this morning when a client came in and requested some layout alterations in real time. Well, InDesign and Illustrator basically froze for about 10 seconds with each change. I was waiting on the programs, not the other way around. She suggested I ask for a new computer...
I built my first multi-cpu system in early 2001. It's nice to think I was over two decades ahead of Adobe, and counting.
Sorry for spamming!

This all feels so familiar. Hello Adobe Xpress.

i spoke with a rep from Photoshop and bridge and was supost to get a call about illustrator. i feel adobe dev teams are not lessening to there clients anymore. my team of 56 is now only 2 using illustrator the rest use corel. or inkscape. (most is just basic color changes or turning on and off layers.) but still that is a loss of 54 users. PLEASE ILLUSTRATOR TEAM FIX THIS

Adobe, please address this issue or update us about what is going on with the status of this being under review for FIVE years.

I'd love to hear from someone who has made the switch from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. I'm too invested in the Adobe infrastructure for other software in their suite to save myself any money by switching but I'm at the point I'm considering switching just to make my creative experience quicker and smoother and more reliable. I'm so gutted as I love illustrator and have years of experience but they clearly have no intention of taking advantage of multi-core performance.

Just waiting for an "added to backlog" message from Adobe. Like with InDesign GPU acceleration for Windows over a year ago. I'm always eagerly anticipating that feature with each update, and utterly disappointed when they completely disregard it. The lack of multithreading with Illustrator (and a bunch of other Adobe programs) is even worse than the lack of GPU support for InDesign in Windows, since this affects literally everyone...

Yes, of course, Annual Subscription, more constant and faster updates to obtain (3 updates a year if I'm not mistaken), therefore increasingly heavy software with new versions.
The software becomes heavier, they always work on Single Core, programmed obsolescence is felt much more (distorted by the use of the single core), so they force us to change computers and invest in increasingly performing and expensive machines (more performance more cost). Only to discover that the software always works at the minimum of its relative power. With updated PCs, the increase in speed / performance remains evident but always minimal compared to the actual power of the machine.
PS: they say that the adobe software goes slightly faster on APPLE, who knows maybe they wink at those of the apple by diverging on their products?

The fact is that the competition in terms of Cost / Performance is a notch if with 3 notches higher!

or am I wrong?

Don't worry y'all, I gave money to their Kickstarter. When they reach the next milestone goal they said they'd bring Adobe products up to 2010 standards. Almost there!

I'm so glad they forced us switch to an annual subscription so we could get upgrades and improvements sooner! I totally see how that's working out.

@Joel Swan — that gave me a good laugh, thanks for that 😁

You gotta give Adobe a break. Hyperthreading may be old tech, but they're an indie company with just a few programmers/developers. Give them time and I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Hyperthreading was introduced in 2002. So it could be said that Adobe has missed the boat by two decades at this point.

We may not have known way back then just how mainstream hyperthreading and eventually multicore systems would become, but it didn't take long enough to justify this kind of delay. This is just flagrant incompetence.

InDesign has much the same problem. Performance is atrocious. And it's extremely obvious that everything is running through a single logical thread because everything grinds when it's calculating text flow, wrapping, justification, etc.

Adobe, there is no excuse that could justify a company of your size, with your insane revenue stream, failing this spectacularly.