Photoshop performance on Dual Core Processors

K
Posted By
KSSumra
Apr 24, 2005
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Will the Photoshop CS or CS2 run faster on dual core processor workstation? How much better will the performance of CS or CS2 be? Also is the CS2 able to address just 2 GB of memory or can it address more?

I believe this question will be more appropriate for Adobe engineers. My thanks in anticipation of the answer.
K S
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BH
Bobby_Henderson
Apr 24, 2005
Photoshop is a multi-threaded application (and has been so for many years now). It will yield significant performance improvements on any Mac or PC multi-processor system, or even Pentium IV single core systems with hyperthreading. The performance improvements vary depending on the task. It could be anywhere from a small 10%-15% to as much as 80% or so. You won’t see fully double the speed improvement since some performance overhead is used on managing threads between each separate CPU or internal core.

Dual core processors will not change the amount of memory that can be assigned to Photoshop. The 2GB limit is only going to be raised once Photoshop is compiled for 64-bit code.
P
Phosphor
Apr 24, 2005
It’s "more complicated" than that according to Jeff Schewe’s article on The PhotoshopNews Blog <http://photoshopnews.com/?p=134>:

Photoshop CS2–How much RAM? – Fact

"Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 will be able to go beyond the previous 2gig/process barrier that pervious versions of Photoshop were limited to. The answer of “How Much Beyond” varies. . ."

"On OS X with the supported system versions, Photoshop CS2 can go to 3+ gigs. The actual amount could be 3.5 gigs or so, but due to certain reporting issues, it’s tough to say precisely. Tiger (10.4) will not expand beyond this limit since at the root, OS X is still really only a 32 bit OS with certain 64 bit optimizations and Photoshop CS2 is still a 32 bit application for both Mac & Win."

"For Windows, the answer is more complicated. If you are running Win 2K or XP Home/Pro with SP1, the limit is still 2 gigs. With XP Pro & SP2, the limit is 3 gigs -IF- you’ve enabled the 3 gig boot switch, which can be problematic."

"If you are running the released version of Windows XP 64 bit edition and are running either an AMD64 or Intel EM64T chipset, the limit will be 3+ gigs or so with the same issue of reporting issues."
TO
thomas_odom
Apr 24, 2005
I’m running CS with XP pro. No 3gig switch enabled. CS has access to about 2.62 gig of my 4096 meg of onstalled RAM. I could increase it, by upping the 50% of the 1750 that adobe caps at, but prefer system stability when I run other RAM hogs concurrently.
No big deal! I just have adobe using Ramdisk program as it’s scratch disk. You should try it if you like working with big image files like panoramas.
Tom
ND
Nick_Decker
Apr 24, 2005
Tom, which CPU?

Thanks,

Nick
SB
Scott_Byer
Apr 25, 2005
Phosphor’s inclusion of the memory info should answer that question, though we’ve also done some things to allow the OS to help take advantage of more memory. We don’t have everything characterized yet, but a 6GB RAM system seems to do pretty well.

For dual-core machines, we’re still checking into things. Photoshop can of course use the dual core as a two processor system, but memory bandwidth quickly enters the picture, and so not everything gets the full speed boost you might expect.

I would definitely favor a dual core system over simple hyperthreading, though.

-Scott

wrote:
Will the Photoshop CS or CS2 run faster on dual core processor workstation?

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