26.1 seems to have broken this again... rolled back to 26.0.3 and it is fine.

@Reio Oh, when I wrote it I thought that you still had the mac in working setup. No worries. :)

Unfortunately I shelved the Mac Pro and re-used the disks, so it's a bit too much work for me now to get it working just to test. :/

Single Monitor (iMac) calibrated with Spyder and DisplayCal here.

But the workaround on the top is suggested for working color profiles (using a german version, so I hope it is called that way) in Illustrator and not monitor calibration settings in System Preferences... If using a standard monitor profile helps (have not tried it yet) it is something completely different than the workaround Adobe provided.

And Adobe: even if this "monitor settings trick" should help - It can’t be the solution not using custom monitor profiles in a professional workflow, just to get features working again that alredy worked a while ago. Maybe you should just compare the sourcecode from the versions that DID work with the versions, where it STOPPED working in order to find the problem...

@Reio It would be great if you can give it a try with default profile (I also suggest single monitor for the test) and give us some feedback on this.

Thanks!
V.

Very curious, I was also using dual monitors with both of them calibrated.

Hi there,

For me the North America profile did not work. But accidentally I found out the following:
If I use the MBP without external monitor, GPU preview works. When I use my Dell U2720Q does not work.

I thought the difference was the monitor BUT it was the color profile. Laptop screen is using default color profile.

I have calibrated Dell with i1 Profiler. When I use the default color profile (and restart Illustrator) IT WORKS.

Now the most interesting part is: If I start the Illustrator with the default Dell U2720Q profile and then switch to my calibrated profile, GPU preview is still working normally.

So im using this stupid workaround for now.

I hope that this might help someone here, or even help Illustrator team to resolve the issue.

Ps The same setup and profile was working fine with Illustrator 2020 version.

MacBookPro 2016
Osx Big Sur 11.5.2
2,7 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Radeon Pro 455 2Gb
Intel HD Graphics 530 1536 MB

I personally gave up the old Mac Pro and switched to the Windows machine for now. It's awkward, but at least the acceleration works.

Well, with a company like Adobe, who claim supreme demands in terms of themselves as a market leader, in 2021 and in a software with such a long history like Illustrator, I should be able to use any desired color profile without any glitches. Apart from this, I don’t use this specific color profile "Generic-CMYK", so this can’t be the reason here. And I also don’t want to use "North America General Purpose 2". I am using color profiles from ECI as RGB and CMYK working color spaces and these are synchronized all over the Adobe CC on my Mac and I think it is not asking too much, using my desired color profiles AND having proper GPU-acceleration.

The post from the admin pinned above solved the problem.

Since I reset the color profile in Adobe Bridge in Color Management („Europe prepress“), the GPU acceleration has been working properly.

Bug still not fixed with v 26... Just opened a file that was created with v 25 and Illustrator switches to CPU-Preview. After that, "View using GPU" is greyed out and I need to restart Illustrator to be able to switch it back. I can reproduce this bug with several Files made with v 25. By the way, v 25.0 was the last Version for me, that did not have this bug. Every v25.x had this bug here and v 26 isn’t any better. I installed v 26 from scratch, not taking over the preferences from older versions, just in case... But this did not help either.

To re-iterate. My bug report concerning the Artboard Tool breaking GPU acceleration was merged with this report. The bug with Artboard Tool has not been resolved.

Unfortunately nothing has changed with the current version 26.0 of Illustrator.

For me 24.3. was the last version with a (constantly) working GPU acceleration … and now v 24.3 is no longer listed / supported(?) within the Creative Cloud App under „other versions“. Why is that?

The real pain: there are work colleagues which are not aware of the technical difference between GPU and CPU acceleration. They did not notice the new „greyed out GPU option“. But what they noticed is that somehow Illustrator became super slow over time and they are fed up with using this app. Unfortunately they depend on it.

The problem appears with my iMac and my PC.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017)
3,8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
Radeon Pro 580 8 GB
macOS Catalina (10.15.7)

This is still broken in v26.0 for me.

Screen recording I previously posted:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com/assets/226793869/Screen%20Recording%202021-02-09%20at%2010.58.45.mov

It still breaks exactly the same way.

The latest working Illustrator version is 25.2.3 with MetalGPURendering set to false.

Edit: In fact MetalGPURendering set to false will disable acceleration from the start. Without it it works until I use the Artboard Tool.

for me, it has never been gone...

Looks like this bug is back!

Illustrator 25.4.1 is practically unusable and has been for the last few versions, artworks continually greys out when zooming in.

25.4.1 Doesn't fix this issue at all for me. I can't use the latest version because viewing a doc in outlines stalls and I must force-quit the app. Earlier versions don't work, because copying and pasting text objects separates every character and destroys formatting. Summary: There is no version of Illustrator that I can reliably use. This is becoming a joke.

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655 1536 MB

25.4.1 Seems to have solved the issue for me.
Win 10, NVIDIA Studio driver 471.11

25.4.1 still not working. Same bug, same problem