Photoshop CS4 Performance Examined

[Hooch Tan]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2342736,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532' target='_blank'>http://www.extremetech.com/article2...2129TX1K0000532</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"If you've ever used Photoshop, and watched the little progress bar crawl across the screen when you apply a filter, you've no doubt wished for better performance. Performance in photo editing applications has become a little more complicated, partly because there are more photo editing apps out today, but also because the graphics chip companies are in the game, accelerating portions of current generation photo editing software."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1236814695.usr20447.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Not being a hard core photo editor, I've never really found myself waiting while doing anything in Photoshop.&nbsp; Of course, simple crops, red-eye removal and copying and pasting images together is most of what I've done.&nbsp; I have to admit that upon hearing that Photoshop CS4 utilizes your GPU, I had to wonder just how useful it would be.&nbsp; So I'm naive and ignorant.&nbsp; ExtremeTech took four computers with various hardware, though all fairly powerful, to see what difference the GPU integration makes.&nbsp; The results are quite enlightening and definately make the case for those who edit a lot of high resolution photos to trick out their rig and upgrade to CS4.&nbsp; It's beyond my means or needs, but perhaps some of you could be tempted!</p>

[Jason Dunn]

I like the idea of that article, but it pretty badly done - there were way too many variables and the conclusions don't really pull out the details that I wanted to know. Sure, I know that Photoshop performance is better on a $3000 computer than on a $1000 computer, but is it more about CPU? RAM? SSD vs. HD? That's what I'm curious about...

[Rob Alexander]

I like the idea of that article, but it pretty badly done

Exactly! I stopped reading once I read the page with his test beds. Wow, that's big news, Photoshop will run faster on a high-end system than on a low-end system. I needed someone to tell me that?

What would have been useful would have been to take the three systems and test the three different video cards on each one so we could isolate the impact of the cards and answer the practical question of whether it's worth upgrading your graphics card for Photoshop work based on whatever type of system you have now.

[ToddCS4]

For the portions of CS4 that are optized for OpenGL (on Adobes sight) you will see a very very big improvement by using an OpenGL 2.1 compliant card (ATI or NVidia)

In my tests with 512,1GB,2GB versions of the ATI 4870 (latest card) I saw very little difference between 512 & 1GB and zero difference with 2GB

If you have CS4 and dont have one of these cards look for a 4850 that is 2.1 compliant, 512MB will do

As far as general performance the mantra is (more of less) to put your money where the constriction in your system is, for a lot of people that are seeing lag the bottle neck is usually memory, then CPU, then disk

1. Upgrage to 64bit OS
2. Push memory as high as you can go
3. Get 2.1GL compliant card (for Vista as well as CS4, it makes a huge difference on vista)
4. Fix your disk subsystem so their is no contention between OS/CS4 and Paging/Scratch files (about $100 to do this)
5. Upgrade CPU

Of course if you are doing a new system the i7 (920 NOT 960, about a $900 difference) is where to put your money, the i7 Systems SCREAM if configured correctly.

Todd