07-19-2008, 02:22 PM

I'm a new Mac user, and I'm not too sure about the speed of it. I just did a side-by-side comparison of CS2 with my iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.16GHz, 3GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT) with my Dell Laptop (Pentium 1.6GHz, 504MB RAM) and while CS2 loaded much faster on the iMac, once it was open it was either the same speed, or slower than the Dell. For example here's what I found:

*When painting with a brush, both painted at the same speed, a tiny delay from where the paint brush moved to, to the paint being applied to the image.

*When moving the mouse cursor from the image to the tools palette (or menu bar), the cursor would change from the brush cursor to the arrow instantly on the Dell, and almost a good half second on the iMac.

*On the Dell, when changing brush size with the shortcuts, [ & ], if I held either key down the brush size would instantly get bigger or smaller, and would keep changing size until I let go of the key.
On the Mac, I would hold down the shortcut key and nothing would happen to the cursor, but you would see the numerical value of the cursor size changing in the little window on the top left. When I let go of the key, the cursor would then pop to it's new size, however it wouldn't be in real time.

Please help me out, I bought the iMac for the sole purpose of making the editing my photos a faster process and it ain't helping.

Thanks in advance,
Christian

07-19-2008, 02:40 PM

One of the main reasons why CS2 is slower, is that it is written and compiled to run on a PowerPC processor. That means on your Intel Mac it is running in an emulation layer called Rosetta

www.apple.com/rosetta/

Any emulation will give you a performance hit

You will have to upgrade to CS3 to get adobe apps that run natively (and fast) on an Intel mac

07-19-2008, 10:46 PM

Thanks for the information.

For anyone else who wants to know more on this topic here is an article from Adobe:

http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf