Help please. Why is My Mac Pro so much slower than my old pc?

I will try to keep this short and to the point. Using Adobe Photoshop CS3 on both the PC and the Mac pro ( see my config below ) While using photoshop
the mouse lags, the screen redraw is MUCH slower and anything visual is so slow. I have been on a pc for years its and old amd chip but the mouse, and speed of the pc just blows away this mac. WHY? I just spend 5 times the amount on this suped up machine. The mac for sure is sexier but so slooooow.
Perfect example! When i take the paintbrush in Photoshop, i paint a color across the screen. I wait seconds for it to catch up to the mouse. On the PC, there is NO LAG at all period. Is there ANYWAY of boosting the performance of this mac to at least get close to the speed of the PC? I dont want to sell the mac i love it but comon it should be AT LEAST as fast as a much older PC.

Take a look at my specs please. Is there anything i have in this machine after the upgrades thats making this thing so slow?

Thank you very much in advance

SPECS:
Two 2.66ghz Dual-Core Xeon

9GB ram - ( 4/ 2GB moduals ) 2/ 512 modules

(Two Hard Drives)
Bay one 250gb SATA

Bay two,750gb SATA

(two video cards)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI) on slot one

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI) on slot two

One 16x SuperDrive

Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme

Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse

OSX 10.4

ghdk11, first of all, Welcome to Mac Forums!

Secondly, you have spec'd out and purchased a dream machine. That machine should be a screamer. Furthermore, CS3 is a Universal Binary, which means it runs native on your Intel cores. There is NO WAY such a machine should be performing so poorly.

I see only two possibilities:

1/ Some other process/application is hogging a LOT of CPU time. You can track this down by opening Activity Monitor and looking at the running processes and the amount of CPU they are using while you have CS3 running. Activity Monitor is in your Utilities folder. Do you see any "hogs"? On a normal system, the "%CPU" column shouldn't show anything taking more than a few percent unless you are actively commanding it to do something. For example, on my G5, with Photoshop CS2, Firefox and Thunderbird running, I see no single entry over 2%.

2/ You have a hardware problem. My money on is on this one. Do you see any other slow apps on the system? You may want to take the machine into an Apple store and have them look at it.

As a final note, can you confirm that it is CS3, not CS2, that you are running? CS2 is NOT a Universal Binary, and as such has to be emulated under Rosetta. This is known to be slow. Also, if you ARE running some Rosetta based programs, at the same time as Photoshop, this may account for lots of CPU being used by them, but we should see that in step 1 above.

Let us know what you find.

Thanks for your reply!

I checked like you said and the Activity monitor is really showing little to nothing of anything else other than Photoshop. Everything looks fine there.

As for the the Version of photoshop its CS3 extended.

Just so there is no misunderstanding, the computer if flying in all other apps. Even in photoshop applying a filter or writing to disk. ITs MOVING. the only slow down im seeing is with screen redraws. Being this is an NVIDA card as opposed to an ATI card which im using in my old PC could this be where the slowdown is occurring?

Which brings up the next question. Should i be using ATI in the mac for Photoshop work?

OH one more thing. I installed bootcamp and windows XP on the mac. Loaded up Photoshop and same issues. slow graphic perfomace even though the all other apps are flying.

What should i do from here?

What screen resolution are you drawing this on? Cause lower end cards have to cope with high resolution display + photoshop...

im running full resolution with an Apple 30" display.

The 7300GT may not be real happy driving that display. On paper, it ought to handle it just fine... but that may be asking too much of it. That's all I can think of outside of a software issue. Try reducing the resolution on the display to 1280x800 and see if photoshop is any more responsive. It'll look terrible, and I don't expect you to leave it that way... It's just an experiment. If it works better at 1280x800, then the graphics card is the problem.

Any card from the last few years will be able to run a 2D application like Photoshop in its sleep.

Can you try this benchmark on your Mac and PC and post the results?
http://www.retouchartists.com/pages/speedtest.html

To be honest though, I remember the screen draw issue coming up before. The paintbrush lags on my iMac too in CS3, but I don't often use that tool quickly, when zoomed out. I think Tiger isn't the best at redrawing for some reason. Maybe Leopard will have it nailed.

I suspect your Mac Pro will thrash your PC in that benchmark test, but you might have to put up with the dodgy paintbrush tool.

ghdk11 said:

im running full resolution with an Apple 30" display.

Click to expand...

I think I start to understand. With a 30" display you are probably running at the full resolution, which is 2560x1600. Furthermore, you are likely editing full screen, requiring the card to update the entire 2560x1600 pixels on the fly? Geeky1 has the right suggestion. Drop it down to a lower resolution as a test. If things improve, you have your culprit.

The answer? A stronger video card. nVidia is a good brand - don't worry about that, but the 7300 isn't the beefiest of graphics chips. A 7800 will run rings around it, and of course these days, we up in the 88xx range I think. You may simply need a stronger video card to work effectively on such a large display.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Sure the resolution is high, but the days of cards not being able to update smoothly in high resolution in 2D are long gone.

Sure the 7800 will run rings round it in 3D applications, but the 7300 is easily able to update massive numbers of pixels in 2D.

If this wasn't the case, the GeForce 2 in the old G4 we have at work would collapse being asked to run Photoshop on a 21" screen. But it handles it with ease.

Alexis: I agree with you that it's a long shot. And, theoretically speaking, it ought to be just fine. The 7300GT has a pixel fill rate of 1400MPixel/s and the 30" display is 4.1MP; so in theory it ought to be able to refresh that display almost 342 times a second...

But, it's worth a shot. It's either a software issue or a hardware issue, and changing the resolution down is a simple way to rule out one of the two (admittedly, the least likely of the two, but one potential cause, nevertheless) very quickly.

I just tested Photoshop CS3 on my MBP with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and the 128MB 8600M GT and the paintbrush tool works flawlessly (in Tiger) so I doubt it's a problem with Tiger, could be some other software or probably hardware though.

Did you put those 2x512MB sticks of RAM in yourself? You could try taking those out, long shot but they might be causing problems for the 4x2GB sticks?

Actually guys, this thread got me thinking about my Mac. My PowerMac G5 comes with an nVidia 6600 chip, and I have always noticed that certain Photoshop screen operations are slower, much slower, on my Mac than they were on my PC. Of course the PC was running CS, and the Mac is running CS2, so it is not a direct comparison, and in general, the Mac outperforms the PC in most Photoshop operations by a healthy stretch.

But, simple things like resizing a paintbrush on the fly with the "[" and "]" keys is signficantly slower. I literally press the key and wait. About 10 seconds later the brush resizes. It was instantaneous (to the human eye anyway) on my old PC based CS version.

I wonder if other people notice things like this? Is there a systemic problem of sorts related to Photoshop's brush performance on Macs?

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=317280&sliceId=1
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401089

Mac57, I just tried the Paint Brush tool on my iMac G5 2.1Ghz with iSight. The second I press the [ ] keys the number changes basically instantly. No delay at all.

I just tested Photoshop CS3 on my MBP with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and the 128MB 8600M GT and the paintbrush tool works flawlessly (in Tiger) so I doubt it's a problem with Tiger, could be some other software or probably hardware though.

Did you put those 2x512MB sticks of RAM in yourself? You could try taking those out, long shot but they might be causing problems for the 4x2GB sticks?

Click to expand...

Can you start a new canvas 1600 x 1000 pixels, 300dpi and select a size 12 brush.

Paint all over the canvas reasonably quickly.

On my brand new 20" 2.4Ghz iMac with 1gig of RAM and my 20" 2.16Ghz white iMac at work the line lags quite a lot behind the cursor.

This is on CS3 by the way.

technologist said:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=317280&sliceId=1
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401089

Click to expand...

Thanks technologist. I went through both links, but there was nothing there that helped. I have been through most of this sort of stuff before, although I had never seen the information presented by Adobe themselves. Thanks for the links.

Isn't Photoshop a Cocoa application?

Therefore limited to 32-bit, thus it can't address more than 4GB of RAM.

The 7300GT is rubbish, plus you're sharing PCI express lines by having more than one card.

X1900 is much faster.

I remember it took about 5 minutes for me with CS2 under Rosetta!

gilesjuk said:

Isn't Photoshop a Cocoa application?

Therefore limited to 32-bit, thus it can't address more than 4GB of RAM.

The 7300GT is rubbish, plus you're sharing PCI express lines by having more than one card.

X1900 is much faster.

Click to expand...

Mac OS needs some ram + some widgets + background processes + disc cache etc So having more than 4Gb helps in that PS has its full amount. Personnally I went for 6Gb it was a cheap option ie 2x512 with computer plus 1 of 2x512 + 2 of 2x1024 from kingston.