Hey Coyotemax,

Late to the thread here, but we're running CS4 here at work, and the artists have complained about similiar issues. (I work in the video game industry and my job is tools support for the artists, including writing scripts for Photoshop - so I get to hear all the complaints!).

I'm really interested in anything I can learn to help solve this issue.

Here's my take on things so far.

I think the hardware acceleration introduced in CS4 is largely the source of the problem. From what I've seen, it looks like a lot of CS4's processing power has now been dumped over to the video card, so with that 128MB card you're running, that might be part of it.

And turning the OpenGL option off honestly seems to do almost nothing in terms of performance increase.

We're running 512 MB Quadro FX 1700's (primarily an OpenGL card) and we *still* get slowdowns. We ran CS2 smoothly and then as soon as we upgraded to CS4 we ran into problems.

Of course, we're also still on 32-bit XP machines with 2 GB of RAM.

Which brings me to... what OS are you running? CS4 has a 64-bit version, and running that under a 64-bit OS is obviously going to help. Windows XP 32-bit (I've never run 64-bit XP) - recognizes 2 GB maximum, 3 GB with a little bit of jiggerypoke. Windows Vista 32-bit will recognize about the same, Windows Vista 64-bit will recognize up to 64 or 128 GB or something like that. However, I'm not entirely sure CS4 will even take advantage of all that extra RAM, and I haven't had the opportunity to try that, unfortunately.

If anyone else out there is running CS4 with a blown out PC config, I'd be interested to know how it runs!

I have run into a RAM limitation problem at home on my Mac Pro (I'm running OS X.5.7). In the CS4 preferences, it will only allow you to allocate 3 GB to it, and I have 8 GB in the machine. It doesn't make sense to me why Adobe would put a restriction on that, and then put the heavy lifting on the video card. Apparently, with Snow Leopard's release in September, it will up the amount of RAM you can allocate to CS4. Not sure how that is going to work, but that what's I was reading of late. (If you believe what you read on the internet... )

Oh, one last thing which probably know already - make sure that your scratch disk drives are not the same as your OS drive. It helps somewhat if Windows and Photoshop aren't competing for access to the same drive.

Cheers,
GiantAcroyear