Photoshop not as fast as I thought

I do loads of Photoshop work - I have been using it on XP for years. I was excited about using it on Mac as people were always telling me how much better it runs. I loaded up a web design I needed to finish off last night and used Photoshop for the first time on Mac. It didn't seem too fast to me - in fact it seemed a bit sluggish compared to my three year old PC. It was just things like dragging layers around seemed clunky.

Is it just me? Is it anything to do with running an Intel Mac rather than PPC?

If you're using an Intel Mac, then yes, Photoshop will not be as fast. Photoshop isn't a universal binary yet, it's PowerPC only right now meaning it's running in rosetta.

Next year Adobe will release the new universal binary version and I bet it will scream compared to what it did on XP.

Thanks for the info - that's a shame. Does that mean CS3 will be a universal binary or are they releasing an updated CS2? Is there a release date for it yet?

Are most of the mainstream applications still not universal binary? I'm about to buy Final Cut Pro and Combustion . . .

Thanks.

CS3 is planned for release as a Universal Binary sometime next year, I don't have the exact date but I was reading about it yesterday.

I've heard First Quarter 2007 for CS3.

And no, there will not be an updated CS2. In fact, Photoshop Elements 4.0 for the Mac came out months after the Windows version, and even though the Intel Macs were on the shelves, Elements was written for PowerPC.

Now, if only Adobe would do a version of Audition for the Mac...

I am using Photoshop CS2 on a PowerMac G5 (2.3 GHz dual core). Since it is running on a PowerPC chip, it is running in native mode, vs. Rosetta on your machine.

In personal "benchmarks" I have found it to be up to two times faster than Photoshop CS2 running on my older 3.0 GHz Pentium IV HT under Windows XP. At the same time though, I have also found it to be maddeningly slower on SOME things - silly stuff like resizing cursors seems to be really sluggish, while the big stuff like running filters generally runs rings around the same thing on my Windows box. Finally, Photoshop CS2 loads and runs almost 60% faster on my PowerMac than on my 3.0 GHz Windows box.

So, given that there is a rough equivalence between a PowerPC GHz and a Core 2 Duo GHz, you should expect to see significant improvment in Photoshop performance when you get to CS3 and start running natively again (of course, for all we know, CS3 could bloat up Photoshop so much that it slows right down again, but Apple can't help that!).

If you have OS version 10.4.8, you should see a significant performance improvement.

http://www.macworld.com/2006/11/firstlooks/rosetta/index.php

Has anyone found anything that would make adobe products run any faster on intel based macs? Wondering if there is something that can be added (software) or maybe a boost in hardware that will bring the load times up and up the usage speeds a bit.

Also does anyone know if there will be a cost involved for the upgrade to CS3 or maybe a CS2 universial version?

mac57 said:

So, given that there is a rough equivalence between a PowerPC GHz and a Core 2 Duo GHz, you should expect to see significant improvment in Photoshop performance when you get to CS3 and start running natively again (of course, for all we know, CS3 could bloat up Photoshop so much that it slows right down again, but Apple can't help that!).

Click to expand...

Actually I'd bet that running CS3 on a CoreDuo Windows machine and CoreDuo with OS X is about the same.

Bah lol I hope that's not the case.

I've been on PS CS2 a lot today and although there are a few operations that seem smoother (it seems good at transpranecy) in general my 3 yr old 1.8 Ghz AMD PC feels much faster than my 2.16 Ghz Intel Core Duo MBP. There seems to be a delay on the basic things like selecting tools, exporting and performing transformations . . . I was warned it would be a bit sluggish before I bought the Mac - I thought it would at least be as good as my old PC though. I'm not too bothered though - it seems Apple have done as good a job as they could with the PPC to Intel transition.

I can't wait for CS3!

I believe that the last update to Mac OS X (10.4.8 if I'm correct) improves a lot the performance of Rosetta, making Creative Suite to run much faster. I think I read that in an article in Macworld.

I've only had my Mac for three weeks and updated to 10.4.8 so I've only ever run it at that. Is there anything else thatcould be slowing it down?

Having lots of programs and using up lots of memory, but apart from that, probably not.

Photoshop CS3 was demonstrated on Intel a few weeks ago. Its release is progged for April.

I don't know when work started on it though. If Apple were busy rewriting OS X in x86, what exactly were Adobe doing?

amp up the memory to 2GB and see the performance increase. Rosetta consumes a lot of RAM and 512MB is not enough. Running two PPC apps in rosetta is almost impossible on 512MB but run quite efficiently on 2GB...

I have 3 gigs on my Mac Pro and it still doesn't run as fast as it should. It's useable and does work better than my old X64 AMD notebook. I can also run more than one Adobe app at a time, so that helps. But I can't get version cue working at all, installed on 3 different intel macs and it doesn't work on any of them.