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740 votesStarted (Available In Beta) ·
AdminAvinash Singh Kotwal
(Principal Product Manager, Adobe Illustrator)
responded
Adobe Illustrator's Multithreading Journey Begins!
Dear Illustrator Community,
I'm thrilled to announce that we've embarked on an exciting journey to bring multithreading capabilities to Adobe Illustrator. This significant undertaking will enhance performance and responsiveness across various aspects of the application.
While this is a complex process that will take some time to fully implement, I wanted to share our progress so far.
Our Approach
We've strategically begun by focusing on the most computationally intensive operations—those that typically take more time and block the main thread, resulting in slower response times while you work. By moving these operations to separate threads, we aim to significantly improve your overall experience with Illustrator.
It's important to note that you may see more noticeable impact in some areas than others initially. However, we want to assure you that this is just the beginning, and we will continue this journey to bring improvements across…
An error occurred while saving the comment An error occurred while saving the comment Oh, speaking of files you can't upload, I once had to handle a monstrosity that was an image trace of a print resolution wood texture behind a logo. It was something like 48"x36" and was well over a gig and took something like 5 minutes just to open and draw all the layers (there were only a couple). And if you wanted to do anything... you... just... had... ... to... ... w---.... be..... pati-...ent.
That one made Illustrator crash more than once. lol, it was a nightmare.
I imagine Adobe has the means to reproduce such a nonsensical real-world nightmare. But yeah, that's one of the reasons I think Illustrator needs a few more cylinders under the hood, because we don't always get to choose what we work on and sometimes a client (or corporate) hands you a "situation" and you just have to deal with it.
An error occurred while saving the comment Adobe, this is not "done" at all. You've barely even started. This idea and the support behind it wasn't for a token acknowledgement that multicore systems exist and a surface level of support in only a few aspects of the application.
I'm really curious where you get "up to 5X faster" from, particularly given what core counts are like on most enthusiast and pro-level machines these days. Even mainstream CPU's these days have 10+ cores. Even many laptops offer more cores. So where does such a miniscule number like "up to 5x" even come from? We're expecting _actual_ multithreading, not just optimizing a single function of Illustrator here and there. But don't take that for criticism, optimization when it doesn't break things is a net positive for customers and customer satisfaction.
And considering pan and zoom should be handled by the GPU, the improvement should be an order of magnitude greater. Core counts on even budget GPU's are significantly higher than 10. I just looked at a $50 GT 710 that nobody in their right mind would buy. It has 192 CUDA cores. ONE HUNDRED and NINETY TWO. Not ten.
Even if you were using other cores for others tasks (which you should be) there's PLENTY of room for more than 10x improvement. Considering most of us are probably using primarily vector art, the processing should be insanely simple to compute. The bread and butter of GPUs you might say.
Here are some areas for potential improvement which should be relatively low-hanging fruit:
1. Processing Appearance Effects (adding extra fills, strokes, transforms, shadows, etc. and blend modes)
#1 is probably the area with the most significant potential for improvement in my experience. And honestly, where so much of the complications come from. This absolutely should be the focus of optimization and stability for Illustrator because so much "power" derives from this seemingly minor facet of the program.2. Vector Operations like shape booleans, path simplification, etc. This, to me, should easily be the undisputed fastest aspect of Illustrator. Vectors should be unquestionably stable, fast, flexible, and accurate. I expect a GPU focus for vector math would provide incredible speed benefits. It might even be the case that the current functions don't take advantage of newer CPU instruction sets that could also provide speed and efficiency benefits.
Pan, at the very least, should meet or exceed 60fps at ALL TIMES, in any condition. I wouldn't expect Zoom to perform quite as well because it requires recalculation, but Pan is just translation; there should be absolutely minimal overhead.
Additionally, while accelerations and optimizations are made to things like appearance processing, I think redrawing and recalculating should be offloaded to a non-blocking background thread that is not fatally tied to the main process. I expect this is where a lot of errors and crashes occur and it should not be possible for the main process to crash from something this simple.
There should probably be a little progress bar in the appearance panel that indicates if it is processing in the background. An outline or ghost of the object should indicate it is being worked on (should be user preference, some might want the last known good state to simple stay there until processing is done).
In the event there is a failure, there should be a warning flag raised in the appearance panel. The warning should be non-blocking and non-modal unless the user wants that, but it should absolutely not be fatal to the main process. Perhaps an overlay flag could also be pinned near the offending element(s) to indicate an error status to the user.
A background tasks panel should probably also be available to indicate what Illustrator is working on and perhaps also highlight processes that are taking longer than expected. Having background, parallel, non-blocking, managed threads for processing would also allow recovery from otherwise fatal errors by allowing error handling to monitor the threads and catch exceptions before the main process gets nuked in the collateral damage, losing work, state, etc.
For background processing of things like appearance, users might also appreciate "progressive" or "scanline" render previews. This would provide immediate visual feedback of progress, and provide an interruptible indication of final state in case the user wants to tweak something before waiting for the final result, like maybe a shadow isn't the right intensity, blur, distance, etc. Rather than waiting for the entire process, being able to see and interrupt would also probably help users by reducing frustration and wasting time.
(wow, that got long.)
An error occurred while saving the comment 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.
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45 votes
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3 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment I've just encountered this myself and didn't immediately understand what was happening until I realized editing text pulls focus to the object in each window. It would be nice if Illustrator respected focus and didn't presume to make adjustments to a windows view. If nothing else, a lock for the view would be nice. Rotation (not sure if Illustrator even supports View rotation), Zoom, Proofing, etc. should all be able to be fixed in a window so that you can have an always up to date preview, reference, or whatever you created the window for.
I doubt I'm alone in thinking that's kind of a logical expectation for separate windows into the same file. When I'm programming in Sublime Text or Notepad++ and create another view or window into a file, that second window does absolutely NOTHING unless I specifically change focus into that view/window and do so myself. That's expected behavior. And as others have mentioned, that other view is great for having a certain section of a file in view all the time, like headers, variables, etc.
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1 vote
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87 votes
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90 votes
This feature request is completed and it is available in Illustrator 28.0 and above.
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79 votes
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87 votes
We have the fix available in the latest release. Please update Illustrator using Adobe Creative Cloud application to the latest build for version Illustrator CC 22.1.
Please refer to our knowledge base FAQ – https://illustrator.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/1844590 if you face difficulty in update.
Or get in touch with us at any of the other support channels – https://helpx.adobe.com/support.htmlWarm Regards,
Ashutosh Chaturvedi | Sr. Quality Engineering Manager – Illustrator
Adobe. Make It an Experience. -
155 votes
We have the fix available in the latest release. Please update Illustrator using Adobe Creative Cloud application to the latest build for version Illustrator CC 23.0.
Please refer to our knowledge base FAQ – https://illustrator.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/1844590 if you face difficulty in update.
Or get in touch with us at any of the other support channels – https://helpx.adobe.com/support.htmlWarm Regards,
Ashutosh Chaturvedi | Sr. Quality Engineering Manager – Illustrator
Adobe. Make It an Experience. -
194 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment I'm surprised this doesn't have more traction. I would argue that one of the most important features of Illustrator is maintaining editability. Why should we have to outline our text in order to use stroke alignment? It makes no sense to hinder a feature this way.
Maybe I use Illustrator in a way that is outside of the norm, but I wish I could add more weight to my vote. I would think logo designers would be all over this feature request.
@Dan Changing the order of the stroke in the Appearance panel does not enable stroke alignment--at least not in Illustrator 22.0.1.
@Avinash, thank you for bringing more information to the discussion. I look forward to seeing our complaints get crushed by real improvements.