Where did you get CS4? i was at the adobe-site today to download a testversion but it was not possible

Its not about speed.  its about different options to process and how well it does it.  I've heard lots of people say CaptureOne is better at high ISO than Camera Raw.  Is it faster? no one has even mentioned the processing speed.  Does it matter? not really.  Why?  because 52 seconds to 45 seconds isn't going to make a difference in anyone's life.

PS - IF you aren't running a 64 bit operating system, you might want to consider it.  could pump data out faster and potentially get your files out quicker

Quote from: ichiro17 on October 28, 2008, 18:46

PS - IF you aren't running a 64 bit operating system, you might want to consider it.  could pump data out faster and potentially get your files out quicker

From the performance tests that I have seen, there is no clear cut performance advantage to running Vista 64 over Vista 32.  There are many cases where Vista 64 runs slower than Vista 32.  The main advantage is that Vista 64 can use over 4 GB of memory.

Over 3 GB of memory - XP doesn't recognize more than that, and I don't think 32-bit does either.  However, more RAM = less paging file usage, which makes it faster when you have a program, aka CS3 or CS4, that uses a paging file. 

You would need to have a program optimized for 64-bit for it to make a difference.  Yes, its up for debate, but the increased RAM availability makes up for it more than anything else.  Yes Vista uses alot, but don't forget you can turn off all those little crappers that suck up so there are tweaks

nice...much better system...much faster...big difference...maybe

you must really value 13 seconds if you wanna make a huge upgrade over that though

Is it faster? no one has even mentioned the processing speed.  Does it matter? not really.  Why?  because 52 seconds to 45 seconds isn't going to make a difference in anyone's life.

you couldnt be more wrong. This is just a test on 10 files. I usualy have a batch of 200-300 raw images to process (other thay I had 1000 images from cousin's wedding), and it IS important is it going to be processed in 1 hour, or in 30 minutes.

I was expecting better performance, because they were announcing that new CS4 can use GPU for processing images, with CPU, for better performance. From this test, I dont think it uses my GPU. Maybe my graphic card is old and useless for PS. lol. Or it uses GPU for some other operations...


I will play with it in next few weeks so I will know the difference better.

Over 3 GB of memory - XP doesn't recognize more than that, and I don't think 32-bit does either.  However, more RAM = less paging file usage, which makes it faster when you have a program, aka CS3 or CS4, that uses a paging file. 

Vista 32bit can only see up to 4gb of addressing space (let's call it ram, but it's not really that) of which only about 3gb are usable by user software, cause 1gb is reserved for the OS. A single process (Photoshop for example) can only use up to 2gb of address space.
In practice, if you have 4gb of ram, Vista will only see about 3, any single program can only use 2.

You would need to have a program optimized for 64-bit for it to make a difference.  Yes, its up for debate, but the increased RAM availability makes up for it more than anything else.  Yes Vista uses alot, but don't forget you can turn off all those little crappers that suck up so there are tweaks

Very true indeed. When considering purely processing speed, 64bit software tends to be slower in the common case, for reasons that are really boring to explain here, unless someone is really really interested in them
The whole point of using Vista 64, as I do, is as you say being able to address more than 3gb, which means that if you have 8gb of installed ram, for example, CS4 can see all of them!
More ram equals less virtual memory trashing, less accesses to the slow HD, everything much faster if your files tend to be large and you tend to process more files at the same time.

Peter, about the GPU: CS4 uses the GPU only to run some filters, not for demosaicing as far as I know. That's still done on the CPU. The GPU is a nice beast, but not everything can be easily parallelised to use the GPU efficiently and it surely takes time to move as much as possible from the CPU to the GPU in CS4. They started with filters (blurs, resizing, that kind of stuff). For example a gaussian blur filter on the GPU is quite common and well understood.

I believe that if you have more than 4gb ram installed in Vista 64 and lots of files to process, you can expect CS4 to be faster than CS3.

From what I've tested so far, the CS4 isn't giving me any noticable speed edge compared to CS3 (speaking of Photoshop 64bit). The GPU is used on the first 11 open files and its capabilities are not used only for filters. I think every layer/artboard is seen as a "poligon" for the GPU to lay "textures" on. The new improved zooming options are pointing to that. But I might be wrong.

And sometimes (tested on a E9300 + 9800GTX with 8GB of DDR2 - Vista 64bit) the whole processing part lags... even while doing simple things like zooming, changing order of layers, rearranging adjustment/filter boxes and so on.

I don't think I can afford to use it until they smooth out the whole user experience. Even if in some scenarios (filter application, startup speed...) the speed is greatly improved, the main features are slower;/

p.s.: A sidenote: I was shocked to see that Adobe didn't "upgrade" Illustrator to 64bits as well. Boy oh boy would it be beneficial to have more memory available with that vector beast of ours. CS3 stll suffers from memory leaks;/

Well i didn't know i was on the ignore-list of so many people here 

right, okay, that's a site offering illegal downloads right. So you guys are trying to make a living selling copyright to your images and bitch when someone steals them, but you've got no problem stealing software. Really nice, great work people.

Thanks leaf, it's one of my top peeves in the creative industry. We should all be doing our bit to publicize the value of intellectual property, and that starts with getting our own houses in order.

i got an email from adobe today advertising CS4 but it looked to me that it was just pre-order, I couldn't actually get it yet?! ... not sure if I will though.  I am not sure it is worth the upgrade from CS3

As someone else asked, besides all the talk of speed, are there features that make it worth upgrading to. CS3 has several nice features, particularly in CR that I like a lot. The downside is that Bridge crashes a lot. Usually when I am not working in Bridge.

Quote from: ichiro17 on October 28, 2008, 18:46

Is it faster? no one has even mentioned the processing speed.  Does it matter? not really.  Why?  because 52 seconds to 45 seconds isn't going to make a difference in anyone's life.

you couldnt be more wrong. This is just a test on 10 files. I usualy have a batch of 200-300 raw images to process (other thay I had 1000 images from cousin's wedding), and it IS important is it going to be processed in 1 hour, or in 30 minutes.

I was expecting better performance, because they were announcing that new CS4 can use GPU for processing images, with CPU, for better performance. From this test, I dont think it uses my GPU. Maybe my graphic card is old and useless for PS. lol. Or it uses GPU for some other operations...


I will play with it in next few weeks so I will know the difference better.

Okay then, lets do the math.

Assuming you want it to take 10 seconds less to process 10 files, that means 42 seconds instead of 52.  That means 1 second per file, which means 300 seconds per 300 images. 

On a set of 300 images, you save 5 minutes.  It also means 4.2 seconds of total processing per file, which is nothing. Anything more is just trying to ask for miracles, unless of course you want the process to be done for you in camera. 

In my opinion, (and I've changed my workflow) the more efficient way to streamline is to cut out manual tasks through actions in Lightroom and Photoshop and do less manually - or at least have the computer automate most of it.  You can then pump out more final versions of files than having to worry abuot raw processing times.  Allocating resources properly is more than half the battle in cutting down production times

much slower in real work

Exactly!

32bit plug-ins will apparently not work in 64bit version of CS4.