I use Illustrator to create large, detailed pattern designs. The .AI file size of one of these designs typically exceeds 500MB. When I’m working on a large file like this, Illustrator performance is so slow, taking about 5 seconds for even the simplest operations, like zooming in and out. I’ve tried avoiding Overprint view, and switching to Outline view, and those help only a tiny bit.
Here’s a screen recording showing how moving a group of objects takes about 10 seconds:
The file shown is an 800+ MB .AI file.
Edited just to add stats on Illustrator according to Activity Monitor during the screen recording:
- CPU 93.3%
- Memory 4.43 GB
- Disk 1.6 MB
I’m wondering whether upgrading to the latest Macbook Pro will significantly speed up this process. Or if I just can’t expect to efficiently work on large files on a laptop, and should just switch to an iMac. Or if it’s just that Illustrator performance is really slow compared to Photoshop and InDesign, and it’s an Adobe issue, according to this:
Why is Illustrator throttled to 2% speed when it's in the background?
My current Macbook Pro specs:
- Macbook Pro 15-inch 2017
- 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7
- 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR memory
- Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB memory
- Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB memory
- 1TB SSD storage
The specs of the Macbook Pro I’m eyeing:
- Macbook Pro 15-inch (2018 or 2019?)
- 2.9GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz
- 32 GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
- Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory
- 1TB SSD storage
(I’ve also thought about moving to other vector software which have been specifically designed for Mac OS, like Affinity Designer and Sketch, but they seem to be lacking some of the Illustrator features I rely on.)