I've now got 4 artboards.
All 2048x1536 iPad sized.
I have only about 100 objects. They're all primitive objects. Just boxes, circles, etc... and about 60 of them are text objects.
I'm using only two fonts throughout the artboards.
I'm not using any effects, not even rounded corners. (still can't believe that's an "effect")
This is a 15 Inch Macbook Pro, Retina. I have the Video Card forced on. There's still 3 GB of RAM free. Nothing else is using my CPU or GPU.
Yet the performance is woeful.
It feels like using Corel Draw on a Celeron in the 90's.
Everything from panning to moving objects to adding more type is slow. Nothing is fluid and responsive in the sense that I'm accustomed to with 3D software. NOT EVEN CLOSE!
If I punt things around with the arrow keys, I sit and wait after ten taps for the object to get to its final destination.
I'm new to Illustrator, so I've put up with it while I'm the slowest part of the software. But I'm starting to learn keyboard shortcuts and become faster... but the software is now so slow that I can't imagine it's worth my time to get faster at using it.
Is this normal behaviour?
Is it faster on Windows on the same sort of specced machine?
UPDATE: Indesign isn't much better. It's maybe 50% faster. But that's not 10 frames per second. Turn on Live Screen Drawing and it crawls back to about or slower than Illustrator... with... wait for it... just 12 boxes on the screen.
Is this for real? The CPU use is not even spiking. It just appears to be really poor prioritisation of drawing to the screen.
I can have literally thousands of objects (3D models) in a scene on this same computer, and run at or near 60 fps in genuinely high end 3D software... yet Illustrator can't cope with less than a 100 simple objects without stalling to what looks like about 5 frames per second response rate?