Modelling Tire Tread

I have had quite a bit of difficulty modelling tire tread or any pattern that has a high number of iterations to it. The resultant geometry not only bogs SolidWorks down to a halt, it also destroys the file in which it was created so that even if the feature is removed, opening the model still drags SolidWorks painfully. Anyone have suggestions on the best way to model complex geometry in patterns without causing this problem? I'm certainly not interested in using textures since for this to work for me it must be photorealistic. I had intended on using this approach to make both a lightweight configuration and a detailed configuration so that I could switch them out. When I needed to work in other parts of the model, I'd load the configuration that had the complex features suppressed to relieve memory, but this never worked. It didn't matter which configuration I used SW behaved the same on them both.SolidworksParts And Features