photoshop cs4 slowing down

[giantacroyear]

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

[Redrobes]

Can I clarify a few points. I reckon its extremely unlikely that its OpenGL slowing the system down if you have a decent GL card fitted. It is possible that Adobe borked the coding so that its crap but there ought to be (almost) no reason why any graphics command that could be executed on the card would be slower than the CPU. Also, and I think here's the killer, if you go to the desktop visual settings and go to the graphics adapter / advanced / troubleshoot and yank the slider for hardware acceleration down to none and restart app and it still goes slow, then its definitely not a graphics acceleration issue.

A PC running Win2K, XP (not 64bit) or Vista (not 64bit) etc has a 4Gb absolute top memory capacity because 2^32 is 4Gb. The kernel takes some of that. The best you can hope to get as a user is about 3 and a bit. If you have XP64, Vista64 then you can indeed get 64Gb. You need a 64 bit capable CPU before you can even run the OS and your apps MUST be compiled for 64 bit in order to use more than 4Gb on that app. Therefore the OSX 5.7 might still be a 32 bit OS. Even if you have 8Gb fitted then its 4Gb wasted. Has to be 64bit OS to go over 4Gb.

So if your photoshop app is 32 bit then you cannot use more than 4Gb for that app. You can have two of them running on a 64bit machine with 8Gb RAM fitted tho but upgrading OS and fitting more RAM is not going to help unless the app is also changed to 64bit type as well. I.e. its not Adobe restricting the RAM is a physical impossibility to go beyond that figure in 32 bit land.

[Midgardsormr]

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

I'm running a core i7 920 2.6 GHz and 12 GB of RAM with the CS4 Master Collection on Vista 64-bit

I just ran a little test of Photoshop. In a 4k x 3k file at 32bits / channel, I created 10 layers, filled each with clouds, changed the blending modes, applied some filters, made a smart object with a smart filter on it, and did some coloring.

My memory allocation for Photoshop wound up around 5.7 GB, and I had no slowdown. I have OpenGL turned off, so there was some tearing as I panned around across the image, but I had no trouble zooming in or out.

Unfortunately, Photoshop remains the only 64-bit app that Adobe has released. I'd love to be able to use the rest of that RAM in After Effects.