• Please use real names.

    Greetings to all who have registered to OPF and those guests taking a look around. Please use real names. Registrations with fictitious names will not be processed. REAL NAMES ONLY will be processed

    Firstname Lastname

    Register

    We are a courteous and supportive community. No need to hide behind an alia. If you have a genuine need for privacy/secrecy then let me know!
  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Photoshop CS 4 Video Card Acceleration Experiences

For those who are unaware PS CS 4 has allowed users to have their video card render screen data while the CPU just works on the image data. With a fast enough supported video card one could potentially greatly improve the performance of a recent slow dual core machine.

I have a not so recent 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 X2 machine with 3 GB of RAM and a not so recent Geforce 6800 GS 256 MB video card. PS CS 3 performance is fine for my needs and so is CS 4. Panoramas, HDR, and many layered images could benefit from more RAM, but working with only one large image at a time solves most memory issues. Faster disk would more greatly affect my workflow than a faster CPU as dealing with large image collections tends to be IO and not CPU bound.

Looking at the supported video card list you will see my cards CPU family listed at the very bottom. Compared with my CPU the GPU performance is close. The GPU is rather limited at 256 MB and has redraw issues when moving from corner to corner in images at 8 MP. Other than that it seems to perform okay. This makes the upgrade to a recent 1 GB gaming card at the bottom of the top of the line seem pontentially inviting at the $200 USD pricepoint. Has anyone found this helpful? But my interest is simply in smoothing out system performance and not speeding it up greatly.

Would anyone using PS CS 4 care to share their experiences with using their video card to calculate screen data?

thanks,

Sean
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Sean,

This is equally important for Aperture by Apple which also uses the graphics card for much of the calculations. However, one can't upgrade the card on one's MacBook Pro which is strange!

Asher
 

Jeff Donovan

New member
My card (nVidia 9800GT) is supported so I will play around a bit with this.

I will say, though, that I just bought a new PC with a quad core processor and 6GB of RAM, so using the card's memory might actually be slower.
 

John Angulat

pro member
Hi Sean,
Give me a day or two and I'll give some feedback. I recently upgraded from CS3 to CS4 and noted a marked decrease in video performance. I'm running a relatively new HP PC with 3 GB ram and never had any issues in CS3. I suspected the video card, which is a older GeForce FX5200. A quick check confirmed it's pre-GPU support. I've got a new card on order. It supposed to arrive tomorrow. Let's hope it solves the issue.
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Hi Sean,

I have been testing the CS4 for a few weeks now on my test OS. I still use CS3 on my production OS. My GPU is a Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB of DDR4 memory. My PC has an Intel Quad 6600 processor and 4GB of DDR2 800 MHz memory. Together they work very smoothly. But this is also the case for CS3 and I do not see an immediate speed difference between the two. If I use the new CS4 rotate tool (shortcut R) the rotation is velvet smooth and very fast. Also, zooming in and out of the picture is very nice and quick. Redraws are immediate. So it might be all together snappier than CS3 but I did not clock them to quantify the differences. Maybe if you can give me some pointers as to what you want to have measured, I can do it for you.

Cheers,
 

John Angulat

pro member
Hi all,
Sorry to be coming back to this thread after I promised a quick reply. I just received an email from a guest viewer of OPF and he asked if I had any good news to report.
Unfortunately I didn't. I'm still having problems.
Below is the text of my email to Sheldon. I'm hoping that by posting it someone at OPF can help both of us out.

This is Sheldon's email to me:

I couldn't locate your further input on the new
card. Did it help?
My CS3 functions instantaneously and like butter . . .
On CS4 the brushes are slow and way behind the cursor
movement. All else is slow, 'stuttery' and in a
word, aggravating.
I have a GeForce 8600 GT card.

The analysis tool at NVidia indicates that the GeForce 9800
GT would outperform the 8600 by a bit more than double.

Yet I am hesitant to spend the time and $$ for something
that might not work . . .
Any input will be most appreciated.

My reply to Sheldon:

Hi Sheldon,
Thanks for the memory jogger as I hadn't posted anything further in the forum on that thread
Sadly, I can't bring you happy news for the New Year...

Your description of what you are experiencing is exactly what happened to me with the upgrade from CS3 to CS4. Slow video, "stuttery image refreshes" (I like that because it describes precisely what I'm experiencing also), brushes lagging. My biggest complaint is the lag when using the sliders in various adjustments such as Levels. I actually have to release the mouse and allow CS4 to "catch up.

Ok, here's what I did. I purchased a new video card. It was an HIS X1500 w/256MB RAM, fan cooled. It was not expensive, aroung $80.00. I'm a bit limited for choices as my PC will seat only PCI cards.

First difficulty - the supplied operating software ifor the new card is huge, took FOREVER to install, and left a ton of icons is my SysTray. Let me also admit I'm a 55 year old guy with decades of computer experience. This stuff is should be child's play for me. However, gaming and watching DVD's on my computer leaves me cold. I don't do it and it seems that every "settable" parameter in the new card's configuration was something related to gaming/DVD's.

Second difficulty - The card install didn't recognize my custom monitor profile. There's only one on the PC. The" "default" is the custom. Why would I have to go back into the card config and tell assign the profile? Weird.

Third difficulty - The card DID improve/correct the problems with CS4. Unfortunately it wrecked everything else it displayed. I mean screen refreshes in IE7 were slow. Video (I'm an avid watcher of NAPP video tutorials) now were choppy, slow and unbearable if you utilized Full Screen. Video was ok in it's normal pop-up widow size, but went to crap at full screen. I was so disapointed I pulled the card and reinstalled the old video card.

Lastly, and most important difficulty - even after I reinstalled the old video card (and of course, CS4's problems reappeared) and the majority of the "screen" related problems subsided, the lousy video difficulties remain. Ah!, I said to myself "you need to uninstall the new video software". I did that. Problem still remains.

Sorry to make this so long winded, but maybe you can glean some information out of my rather less than pleasant experience. Also, I'm going to post this email up on the OPF forum. Maybe someone else can point us in the correct direction?
 

Michael Hendry

New member
Sean,

My experience of Open GL is that it's nothing special, only cosmetic. I've got a brand new quad core machine with separate Raptor scratch disk, which struggles to run CS4, with scale and move commands taking four seconds to effect on a relatively small 130 Mb file. I've tried using Open GL and turning it off; no difference (GeForce 9800GTX 512 Mb). My three year old pc running CS2 is much faster!!

Mike
 
Last edited:

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Sean,

My experience of Open GL is that it's nothing special, only cosmetic. I've got a brand new quad core machine with separate Raptor scratch disk, which struggles to run CS4, with scale and move commands taking four seconds to effect on a relatively small 130 Mb file. I've tried using Open GL and turning it off; no difference (GeForce 9800GTX 512 Mb). My three year old pc running CS2 is much faster!!

Mike
So Michael,

What's wrong with the set up that CS4 runs slower! Is it really setup correctly? Is it possible that there are assignments in preferences that somehow are crippling the software or is this an experience others have reported too with the Quad core computer.

There's a good article one the Adobe website for optimizing CS4 here for Macs (G5 or Intel needed). There is a lot of criticism of CS4 on PCs, read this on Adobe's own site, here. It seems that one has to disable CS4 ability to change settings on the graphics card:


Hugh Hansard said:
I am sorry. I did not make something clear in my post on settings:

The important point of my last post about card settings is not the settings themselves, they will be different for every class of card.

The point is that you need to disable PS’s ability to alter the configuration of the video sub-system or place values in any of the settings.

There is usually a setting in the driver somewhere to disable an application from altering the card’s / driver’s settings. That was the key for me. Once I disabled PS’s ability to change anything, then performance boost was achieved. I then tweaked with the settings to get what I wanted.
Another guy has a major fix which is worth looking at here.

Asher
 
Last edited:

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Sean,

My experience of Open GL is that it's nothing special, only cosmetic. I've got a brand new quad core machine with separate Raptor scratch disk, which struggles to run CS4, with scale and move commands taking four seconds to effect on a relatively small 130 Mb file. I've tried using Open GL and turning it off; no difference (GeForce 9800GTX 512 Mb). My three year old pc running CS2 is much faster!!

Mike

Michael
your install may have been wrong, or maybe a lack of RAM?
CS4 is working pretty fast (and faster than CS3) for me on my MacPro and MacBook pro as well running X.5.5!
It happened to me to work on 1Gb images…

Anyway, performance will increase with Snow Leopard… we should get it very soon (info from my Mac guru…)
 

Michael Hendry

New member
Asher and Nicolas-

My apologies- I neglected to say, I am using a pc running XP pro 32 bit, and have 4 Gb ram installed. I've also read and applied the sizeable article on Adobe regarding optimising performance in CS4 in windows pc's. There seems to be some issue with graphics card drivers, I've had someone from adobe reply to me over a post on their own boards. He's going to offer a fix regarding some settings. I decided to update to the latest graphics driver today and seem to have some improvement, I have to say. I'll monitor it and get back to you when Adobe do to me.

Best Regards, Michael
 

Michael Fontana

pro member
Michael
your install may have been wrong, or maybe a lack of RAM?
CS4 is working pretty fast (and faster than CS3) for me on my MacPro and MacBook pro as well running X.5.5!
It happened to me to work on 1Gb images…

Anyway, performance will increase with Snow Leopard… we should get it very soon (info from my Mac guru…)

yep: Snow Leopard with a big graphic card and the Nehalem-chip of the future MacPros might work well with imaging apps.
 

Michael Hendry

New member
Hi there,

Well, they've got it cracked and I feel somewhat relieved, I have to say. I've tested a new build of PS and it seems perfect. I've installed this and my machine is at last happy. Bridge in CS4 simply flies, btw- it's the way it always should have been.

Regards, Michael
 

Michael Hendry

New member
Hi John,

See the previous post I made in this thread. An engineer at Adobe wanted me to try another version of PS which he let me access on their ftp site, to see if this cured the problem,

Regards

Mike
 
Top