I have Vista 64 and CS4 on a 3 year old Dell Precision workstation with 8 GB of RAM.
I processed a medium sized astroimage the other day... This involved literally hours of work on a 6 megapixel image - thousands of steps, and a number of actions invocations, each of which runs dozens of steps or more.
I loaded up a color image using CS4 32 bit, as I use the FITS Liberator plugin to import images from standard format FITS files. Then I saved the image as a .psd file, closed CS4 32 and switched to CS4 64.
You should know I always set my number of History states to the max: 99. I just like it that way. This does put a bigger strain on RAM usage.
Anyway, I worked for quite a while in CS4 64, and only once noticed any kind of delay in the responsiveness of the user interface. Just once, after many hundreds of steps, Photoshop went silent. Seeing the hard drive light on, I just left it alone for a while, and sure enough responsiveness returned.
I do save my work from time to time, but it's always disconcerting to have the application become unresponsive. Adobe really earned some points with me when it came back.
I've never had CS3 go that long and remain responsive. Usually it goes away for a while from time to time while swapping things to the hard drive.
Toward the end of the editing of this particular astroimage, I pasted it into a big mosaic I have under construction (basically, we shoot small parts of the sky and stitch them together into wide field high resolution images). Again, working with a relatively large multilayer file in 16 bit per channel mode was far better in Photoshop CS4 64 bit than it has been in CS3. It just kept on working, where I really have come to expect some swapping activity.
The GPU enhancements plus the extended responsiveness the larger memory space is providing have made me a happy camper.
-Noel
Noel, what sort of files sizes are you looking at, both the component files and the finished composite?
I'm considering stitching photomapping shots, and I'm just curious to see if CS64 might be suitable for it.
(Of course, it presupposes that I have a platform capable of handling the load).
__________________ Dennis
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Well, the mosaic I described above is 4734 x 7770 pixels, has 11 layers, and saves as a .psd file of 534 megabytes. Individual panes are 6 megapixels.
Just for grins I just opened a big 64 megapixel mosaic of Hubble images I've been working on. It has 43 layers and is 1.1 gigabytes when saved as a .psd. I just did some dodging and burning using brush sizes of roughly 1000 pixels... It stayed interactive through about 35 editing steps (it didn't slow down, I just didn't go any further). CS4 keeps up on a big image better than any prior version of Photoshop has.
Just to be clear: I've tried Photomerge with CS4, but not on images of this size. These are images on which I've hand placed the layers to create the mosaic.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a MacPro can utilize 8 gigs of ram as documented by the 1st linked Adobe Tech Note. Although it does not directly address the additional memory, it is utilized for Photoshop filters and scratch disk memory before the hard drive is accessed.
"When you run Photoshop CS3 on a 64-bit operating system, such as Mac OS X v10.4 and later, Photoshop can access up to 8 GB of RAM. You can see the actual amount of RAM Photoshop can use in the Let Photoshop Use number when you set the Let Photoshop Use slider in the Performance preference to 100%. The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, and actions. If you have more than 4 GB (to 8 GB), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can increase performance of Photoshop."
The tech note is incorrect on the caching issue.
All available memory can be used for caching (eg 30GB or so) and this has a big impact on working with large files.
I have researched and documented this thoroughly and you can read all about it at Macintosh Performance Guide
.
I also cover a variety of hard drives and the optimal RAID configuration in combination with memory, for large and huge files.
__________________ Lloyd Chambers, diglloyd.com, Blog, Free articles: Digital Infrared, Consumer Digicams and Diffraction, Firewire and USB Card Readers, Focus Accuracy, PowerMac G5 Internal Drive Kits, MacBook Pro Experience Report, DPP Batch Processing, Lens Mount Misalignment, Color Temperature and Noise, Nikon Capture Noise Reduction/Speed/Stability/Color Aberration Control, Background blur, Depth of Field, In-depth Reviews: Zeiss ZF Lenses, Guide to Digital Infrared, TheSharpestImage, 28mmShiftLenses
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
All available memory can be used for caching (eg 30GB or so) and this has a big impact on working with large files.
I have researched and documented this thoroughly and you can read all about it at Macintosh Performance Guide
.
I also cover a variety of hard drives and the optimal RAID configuration in combination with memory, for large and huge files.
I read your linked article and appreciate the effort you put into testing various configurations for running Photoshop on a Mac Pro.
I can appreciate how a raid 0 configuration (used as a scratch disk) can greatly speed up Photoshop. What I cannot understand is why you recommend using an external drive connected via firewire 800 as the boot drive. Certainly this is slowing down the total system by creating a bottleneck with the drive that contains not only the operating system, but Photoshop too.
I read your linked article and appreciate the effort you put into testing various configurations for running Photoshop on a Mac Pro.
I can appreciate how a raid 0 configuration (used as a scratch disk) can greatly speed up Photoshop. What I cannot understand is why you recommend using an external drive connected via firewire 800 as the boot drive. Certainly this is slowing down the total system by creating a bottleneck with the drive that contains not only the operating system, but Photoshop too.
A Firewire 800 boot drive causes no bottleneck in a well-configured system following best practices. See these pages (and others):
A 20 sec instead of 30 second boot time or 6 vs 8 second launch time is unimportant. I reboot at most once a week, and with adequate memory application launches are cached by OS X and come out of memory the 2nd time; a fast boot drive will save me exactly 20 seconds a *day* at most. There is no VM paging on a properly configured system.
In short, there is on ROI (return on investment); any decent 7200rpm drive in a FW 800 case will do just fine). You will need to reboot and launch 1000 times to recoup the time spent ordering and installing (for example) a VelociRaptor.
Of course, if you opt for just one drive for system *and* your data, then get the fastest drive that is 2-3X your storage needs. A single drive setup is sub-optimal in a variety of ways, so it's not even worth considering for a Mac Pro. MacBook ro users have fewer options, but there are alternatives.
What I cannot understand is why you recommend using an external drive connected via firewire 800 as the boot drive
This recomendation is for the case where you want maximum performance or storage: you get to use all 4 Mac Pro internal bays for data, with no contention with the system/boot drive.
Bottom line: always separate system/apps from data for best performance. The FW800 thing is just to get one more internal bay, should you need it—which you do for a 4X striped scratch volume for large files.
Also, by partitioning the boot drive (FW800 or SATA), you can get the fastest possible speed out of it, minimal seek time off the fastest part of the drive. I use a 64GB partition for my boot volume, which means something like 1ms seeks on average—way faster than any conventional hard drive.
A Firewire 800 boot drive causes no bottleneck in a well-configured system following best practices.
I still see this as a flaw in your argument. Firewire 800 is limited to transferring 786 mb/sec. The internal SATA connection can transfer a possible 3 gigs/sec.
The boot drive should be one of the 4 internal drives. The scratch disk should be on a separate physical drive from the boot drive and Raid 0 gives best performance. Personally I use a separate dedicated hard drive for scratch disk with no raid configuration. This gives me performance which is more than adequate for my needs working with Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium.
The fastest tested boot drive is currently a striped solid state drive:
Linear Mode
