With the Mac world all aflutter about the release of a Universal Binary beta of Photoshop CS3, the excellent Mac performance enthusiast site Bare Feats has some hard numbers comparing the CS3 beta on the Mac Pro to CS2 and CS3 on the Quad G5 PowerMacs of yore and the results are telling. Running native code the Mac Pro finally gets a chance to strut its stuff, with the Mac Pro handily beating the Quad G5 PowerMac on most tests. Rob Morgan's conclusion says it all: "We've waited many moons for the UB version of Photoshop. Mac Pro owners will love the dramatically improved performance that CS3 offers them. We understand the level of effort and investment required to accomplish this. Thank you, Adobe!"[Via PowerPage]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-22-2006 @ 11:35AM
Twist said...
I have been testing the CS3 beta on my poor old iBook G4 1GHz and I may be imagining it but it seems snappier than CS2. Application startup is noticeably faster though this may be because CS3 appears to load fonts when you first use the Type Tool instead of at application load and also I don't have any 3rd party filters in CS3. Stability has been decent but not as good as with CS2.
My big complaint (and a very long standing one with Photoshop upgrades) is that CS3 still doesn't import custom actions, swatches, patterns, brushes, etc from the previous version. Come on Adobe why can't you add this nice little feature to the dang installer?
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12-22-2006 @ 12:21PM
Jarrod T said...
I definitely agree, I thought CS2 was fast, but the CS3 and the Mac Pro combo are amazing. A folder with 125 compressed Leaf Capture raws loaded in under five seconds in Bridge.
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12-22-2006 @ 4:20PM
Steve Mills said...
Now if they'd only pull their head out of their ass and design some decent icons for CS3.
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12-22-2006 @ 6:52PM
DanD said...
Using a MacBook Pro for portability, CS3 is a welcome reprieve from lengthy waits for file loading and screen refreshes. Where do I line up to buy CS3?
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12-22-2006 @ 7:34PM
Reg said...
The launch time (second last test) is interesting.
They give the edge to a Quad G5, although I suspect it has as much to do with the hard drive model, configuration and how full it is (r/w on an empty drive is faster than a full drive, because the data is closer to the center) than the actual code execution (Photoshop is mainly loading plugins during the startup stage).
I have a striped RAID 0 of two 320GB Seagate 7200.10 drives running on a Mac Pro 3.0 GHz.
Bare Feats' Mac Pro had a first launch time of 17 secs.
Mine is just 10 secs.
I suspect Adobe will be optimizing launch time as the beta progresses, but the ratios will remain much the same. Conclusion: If you want faster launch time (and a general IO speedup as the disk is a bottleneck to exploiting the ful power of modern CPUs), get a faster drive.
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