I've worked at a couple of places that trialled such devices and the speed increase was negligible, if noticeable at all.

I would not recommend any external GPUs that I have ever seen for Mac. Adobe Illustrator (and Photoshop, Indesign, etc) is very greedy with RAM and very inefficient with files sizes so the more headroom the better. It's also worth considering the speed of the storage if you are working with big files and (hopefully) saving them regularly, but most new Macs have SSDs by default now. The speed shift from a Mac with 8GB RAM to the same machine with 32GB RAM (particularly when running Adobe stuff) can be astonishing. If you're sticking with Mac, then buying the fastest CPU and GPU that you can afford will get you part / most of the way to the speed that you want, but having lots of RAM will make just as much (if not more) difference. Next up will be testing with a computer that has a major GPU. Update oct 2017: I have now tested my document on a Windows computer with one of the fastest desktop processors out there right now, the i7 4.0 Ghz and it wasn't that much faster to be honest. Macbook Pro 2015, 2,5 GHz Intel Core i7 with NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB and 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3Īlso I should note that when working with my documents Illustrator runs at 100% of CPU constantly. I mean since Illustator still(!) only uses one core from the CPU I guess it's all about gigahertz when it comes to CPU?Ī lot of questions in one post here but the main issue is: how should I think when it comes to make Illustrator fast?Įdit: I should perhaps add my current config: Would it get a lot faster if I for instance install an external GPU to my Macbook Pro or should I forget Mac and go for a Windows computer? I need to know what's most important – fast CPU or GPU? Now I'm looking for a setup that will make life smoother for me. I'm working with extremely large illustrator files on a MacBook Pro 2015.

Adobe illustrator graphic