I’ve downloaded the trial version of Photoshop CS4 Extended on my XP Home system with 2gb of memory, AMD AthlonXP 3200+ @ 2.19 GHz on an ATI Radeon 9250 video card @ 128mb of memory. In short, a pretty dated system and I’m not having a single problem with the performance of CS4 Extended. My guess is there’s something wrong with your system.
Put the cache up in the preferences, restart CS4 and see if that helps –
Worked for me.
CS2 won’t have a impact on cs4.
Dells run a lot of crapware in the background.
Try turning it off and seeing what happens.
Your best bet is:
Wait for the patch.
This place is packed with:
– Complaints about that very issue
– people accusing your computer specs/driver/PS settings/choice of OS for causing it.
Fiddling with your prefs and settings and expecting all the problems to disappear is a waste of screentime, unfortunately.
OK I have read other similar complaints now and can see it is not just me or my system. What I want to know is, what are Adobe currently doing to solve it, when can we expect a patch, and how will we know as soon as one is ready to test? Are Adobe making anuy official comments – I can’t find one?
You didn’t look hard enough. They have contacted some users who have posted problems here and given them patched build to test on their machines.
Naturally they can’t give a forecast of availability until testing has finished and they have a fix. When it is available it should be available through the Updater and on their download page.
You will also hear all about it here. The major fix for CS3 took months!
Gordon, if you will take a week or so to wade through all 500 gazillion posts on this issue — oh, never mind. You’ll have no better idea what’s going on than anyone else here.
Adobe engineers are definitely working on the problem, that’s for sure. There have been numerous posts from them. Based on what a few engineers have said, there are apparently two camps inside the Photoshop command center: those who are pulling computers apart trying to figure out what’s the problem, and those who are trying to figure out which video card maker, virus scanning software or numbskull computer user (that means you and me) to blame. Meanwhile, several of us have been asked to try out a test build of the program to evaluate for improvements. But it’s obviously slow going, and with nothing new to report, the engineers have been very quiet since New Year. That’s some long hangovers.
There will be a patch, I’m sure. But based on past experience with Photoshop updates, it could be a few more months away.
There’s only one camp inside Photoshop Central – those trying to solve the problems.
But all of us know that the largest causes of problems are still third party drivers (video, printer) and some third party software (some anti-virus). Trying to pretend that all the problems are Adobe’s won’t help anyone — and if you can update your drivers to fix the problem, that’ll happen a lot faster than waiting for Adobe to fix your third party software. Also, eliminating the external problems makes it a lot easier to help Adobe figure out the remaining problems.
Now, there are some problems on the Adobe side, and we’re working on them as fast as we can.
I can understand where drivers can cause problems. Hell, I’m a software developer and have tracked down "bugs" to an OS patch that changed the behavior of some component.
But on the same computer, CS2 runs fine and CS4 runs like a dog???
If it’s anti-virus software, it should be affecting them equally. Same with any other software.
The only thing in my mind that would affect CS4 but not CS2 is 3D graphics card drivers. But people still have problems when they disable 3D functionality.
CS4 was unusable to me. Even though I had the 3D options turned off it was too slow to be usable. I upgraded from a NVidia 8600 GT to a NVidia 9600 GT and now it’s much better.
Still, every once in a while it goes into "unsusable mode" and the only thing to make it better is to save the file, close it, and re-open it. Then hope you can go another 10-20 minutes of editing without it going back into "unusable mode"
Chris
I appreciate that the CS4 problems aren’t entirely due to Adobe and that third party drivers/software are also to blame. However, surely it is not good for Adobe to state that these third party drivers etc., are partly responsible without telling us which ones they are. We (the paying) user base are left to our own devices trying various fixes when much time on our part could be saved removing software/drivers that Adobe finds not to work well with CS4.
All I ask, prior to Adobe issuing a patch, is that you let us know what doesn’t co-operate well with CS4 (many of us probably know which software this might be), but it would be good for Adobe to publish its findings.
Peter – you’re using really bad logic.
AntiVirus could affect them differently if the AntiVirus software had special cases excluding one. Or if small changes in CS4 tickled a bug in the AntiVirus software. Or if CS4 changed some minor detail (like a file path) that was previously excluded. Or….
CS4 does use display drivers differently from previous versions, even trying to initialize the driver can sometimes cause problems (even if we don’t use the GL features).
Mike – the driver problems/fixes are changing daily. I’m sorry, neither I nor my QE group have time to update the list for you every day. (much less test every daily build of all the drivers).
It clear to me what is happening: there are bugs in the PS codebase that need to be resolved. This is hardly surprising in a huge rewrite, such that CS4 represents.
I remember that Acrobat was a POS software for years, ran like a dog, full of bugs, but Adobe gradually fixed it and now it’s half way decent. So Adobe have a history of clunky software, and here we see it again.
I’ll patiently wait for the bugfix update patch. So should you. Meanwhile, I’ll use CS3.
mamba – what are you talking about? That doesn’t sound anything like the current situation.
Hello
It seems to me having read all the posts about this is that the biggest problem is with Video cards that support OGL, whether OGL is invoked or not. It might be an idea to buy a very cheap(Matrox for example)video card and then see if the problems with CS4 persist. I have been using the tryout with a 5 year old computer, with a Matrox G550 AGP video card and CS4 is as fast as CS3 in the functions I’ve used.
My son’s laptop has an Intel Graphics adaptor and CS4 is very snappy. At work I have used a HP core2 Duo with Matrox Parhelia DL 256 PCI and again CS4 is snappy.
Mike Engles
While Adobe blames third party drivers, or anti-virus software for the problems, consumers feel that these things would have been sorted out before releasing the product.
The attitude I hear from Adobe is, stop complaining we’re working on it and hopefully we’ll figure it out, eventually. The perspective of those who spent $200 or $700 or more and have a product which is unusable is much different.
I’m just thankful I downloaded the trial version before bought as it was unusable for me as well. I suppose if they can’t fix it we’ll expect an early release of CS5. Just my opinion.
Hello
As I have said, I have used it on 4 different computers and it runs fine. I don’t think I will buy the upgrade, because I don’t think it is worth it, but it does work.
Have you tried uninstalling the Video card drivers and use the basic Windows ones?
Mike Engles
I tried all the suggested fixes. No help.
I understand there are many users who installed it works perfectly for them, however that doesn’t help the rest of us. Pointing out how many machines you’ve installed it on successfully suggests you think the problem lies with the users. Whereas the fact that Adobe recreated the problem and is attempting to fix it, would indicate that it’s not us, it’s them.
IMO, Adobe should just get out of the business of trying build PS to run on Windows. We’re the bastard children, always have been. We have all these…programs and drivers that Adobe can’t deal with.
Oh! But wait, there’s more! We still have some money they want.
I could forgive Adobe for the problems with OGL if they had provided some way to turn the thing off, so we could at least have CS3’s level of performance.
I’m afraid folks like me who
a) don’t have a computer guy on staff and
b) can’t rebuild computers every time there’s a PS update are going to get left behind (seriously). But photoshop elements and lightroom aren’t going to cut it, so where will we turn?
I’m also surprised there seems to be no way to actually give feedback to Adobe on my experience with CS4.
Thing is, I had the same issues and I have solved them and it runs great – there’s some minor issues here and there but nothing that stop me from working.
alot of people seem to ignore posts on how to fix it and just posts their frustrations and bash adobe….research is the key, my friends 🙂
Perhaps, problems have arisen from a combination of hardware, drivers, O/S set up. BUT, in order to get the best performance in PS you are required, in some cases, to have a fiddle and bear in mind basic principles of PS set-up ( scratch disks on a fast maintained (defragged) drives, plenty of ram….etc ).
My feeling is that the performance issue is also related to unmaintained singe hard drive setup. As well some gpu/drivers combos.
If you haven’t defragged your 5400rpm / 7200rpm drive in a while and run it on a single drive then PS is always going to take a performance hit………
Chris and all, thing as well is:
I stumbled through fiddle marathon full length, using driver updates, GFX settings, OS settings and PS Prefs in 25000 possible combinations, until my eyes bled, to very little avail.
Maybe combination No. 25001 actually would have done the trick.
The very moment I installed the PS CS4 beta patch (Stonehenge 11xxxsomething for guinea pigging, provided by Adobe) the vast majority of all my problems just vaporized.
What does that tell us?
So my advice to all fellows in despair and those rather spending endless hours working for a living is:
Wait for the patch and use CS 1,2,3, for the time being.
Hoorah to all the brave out there, who successfully fought and beat the bugger.
Erbs
Well good news is I got the new NVidia drivers from 1/8/2009 and since then I’ve been able to photoshop 2 different 130MB TIFF files without any problems at atll.
Erbs – the test build solves one issue, that issue only affects some people. The majority of issues still seem to be solved with driver updates or figuring out which third party app/driver is causing conflicts. Even with the bug fix that we’re testing, there are many problems remaining (most of which don’t seem to be in our code, but it’s not easy to tell with so many different problems reported).
Chris,
I`m still wondering why CS4 is slower than CS3 in screen redrawing when OpenGL is OFF. That`s when moving layer content or zooming in or out. Just about everything on screen is slow compared to CS3.
I understand that there may be OpenGL problems, but I`m talking about the slowness without OGL.
I also put in the very newest nVidia driver and this seemed to solve some of the PS problems, but others remain: graphics card fan spinning loudly all the time, text that appears a few seconds after you type it, etc (using dual core HP, GEForce 8600M GS with 256MB dedicated memory).
More work needed, boys!
Stefan – I’m still wondering that myself…. (and we’re looking into it)
If you are still wondering …. that sounds like a patch is far far away…:(
Whilst I’m pleased to hear that Adobe are working on this issue, I can’t understand why this wasn’t spotted at the Beta testing stage. From what I can see a lot of people (including myself) are experiencing performance problems. I can’t understand how such a major issue was missed.
Ha, forget about my problems going away with the new driver. Yesterday I could have bashed my computer in. I had to quit and re-start the program 2-3 times just to finish one stupid file I was working on.
Weird.
David – I don’t know either, and we won’t know until we find the cause. Possibly there is some system configuration or external influence that was missing from our test machines and all beta tester machines. Millions of systems have a chance of showing smaller chance configurations than a few thousand systems…. And the fact that only some people are seeing the problems does point to something different about those systems (could be cause, could be just a trigger), and we need to isolate and reproduce that factor.
