Illustrator extremely choppy in Retina iMac

[Sucrose Escobar]

Alright,

I'm in a bit of a predicament and would love to get some help. Any help.

After weeks of obsessing over the new retina iMac I finally bought mine. To my joy it lived up to every bit of hype. I do a lot of video editing so firing up my Adobe Premiere CC 2014 and Davinci Resolve works like a song. No lag, no choppiness. Nothing. Photoshop works extremely well too. All those high res raw files that was taxing my humble mac Air (late 2010) works beautifully smooth on the Retina iMac.

The Illustrator CC 2014 release, on the other hand is complete let down. Simple files that used to work with no problems at all on my Mac Air is almost unworkable on the Retina iMac. Basically, when a file is open, just scrolling through, is almost impossible. If I drag an artboard, it take a while before the artboard actually moves around the screen. This is not just frustratingly slow but is making extremely nervous, as an equal amount of my work depends on illustrator.

I've tried everything. I reduced the resolution on the Mac to its lowest. I tried quitting every single file open. I tried looking up at the activity monitor to see if anything is taking too much memory. Nothing seems to be out of order. I simply don't understand what's the problem.

I've contacted adobe as well. But haven't gotten any replies so far. I have the latest version of illustrator on my Retina iMac and my MacBook air along with the latest version of Yosemite as well.
If anyone else have had the same problems and have found a way to fix it, please let me know.

Sorry to be so verbose but I hope I haven't missed any details out.

Thanks in advance.
Cheers

 

[Rakehellion]

Sounds like it needs to be updated. Are other people having the same problem?

Use Activity Monitor to see the CPU usage and Quartz Debug to see the GPU usage.

 

[GGabe]

Hi,

I have the exact same problem. I received my retina Imac today.
i7, R9 295X 4GB, 512GB SSD.

I bought it for work only. My main programs are Illustrator and Photoshop for Print, Screen and Typography.

The first thing I tried out was PS and then AI. Latest 2014 CC version.
PS works beautifully. Even a 20k x 20k pixel document scrolls flawlessly.

Scrolling and using the hand tool in AI is a pain. Repositioning a simple rectangle
or another simple object is laggy. I tried out all the screen modes. I placed multiple dozens of objects in in one document to see if it gets worse. But it doesn't. If this can't be fixed, I will be sending my rimac back. It's a big disappointment, because I love and have to work with AI.

Cheers
Gabe

 

[Zaap]

Check if you have this missing font issue:

http://palindrome.com/support/2013/10/27/illustrator-cc-issue-slow-due-to-missing-fonts/

 

[destrekor]

You might want to check in the preferences for Illustrator if the GPU Acceleration is enabled.
I'm not sure about the menu structure for Illustrator, but for Photoshop CC, it's under Photoshop>Preferences>Performance. In there, you would see the Graphics Processor settings.

Another possible performance issue: it shouldn't effect performance that drastically, but have you increased or decreased from the native "Retina" resolution? That scaling option has no performance hit, whereas the other resolution options require additional scaling and rendering at a higher resolution for the first pass. In heavy applications, I could see that causing some slowdowns.