CS4 Slower or is it my crappy Vista?

[marknagel]

<p>My old Pentium 3.2Ghz HT Windows XP died and I bought a new AMD Quad Core 64 bit, 8GB Ram, etc (fastest Best Buy had) with Vista :(.  When I got the new computer I also got CS4.  Although processing certain things is much faster, it seems slower and jerky at times with the live previews (cloane, crop windows, etc).  I amde a lot of changes (new computer, new operating system, new software)  I'm not sure if its CS4 or Vista.  Has anyone else noticed this with CS4 or is it Vista?<br>

<br /> Mark</p>

[squareframe]

<p>Mark,<br>

on my Toshiba (Intel) laptop under Vista, CS4 and Lightroom seem to run quite fast. I have 4GB of ram. no performance issues to speak of .. even Vista has settled down after many updates. now if I could figure out why Firefox 3.04 won't handle cookies correctly anymore.</p>

<p>daniel</p>

[sheldonnalos]

<p>CS4 absolutely screams on my new Vista machine. Handles 500mb scans from 4x5 film without batting an eye.I have a Intel quad core Q9550 at 3.6Ghz, 8mb of RAM, a ATI Radeon 4850 HD video card and separate disks for the O/S, for scratch, and for image storage.</p>

<p>What do you have for a video card? The GPU acceleration with a good video card can make a big difference on screen redraws.</p>

[marknagel]

<p>Sheldon,<br>

Its an ATI Radeon 3200 with 256MB RAM.  Its integrated into the mainboard.  The machine is a Gateway with AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core.   I have a 24" samsung monitor set at 1920x1200.The Geek Squad guy said its the fasted they carry, thats why I'm so disapointed.  Even opening my photo folders Vista seems to scan it (not my anti virus, the stupid blue shaded bar on the top) and it takes too much time (a few seconds to 10), but XP never delayed.<br>

I did notice opening large files in CS4 is effortless, but the simple things like moving the crop window is jerky or the cloan tool preview is jercky.  Do you think putting a better PCI express video card would be better?</p>

<p>m</p>

[sheldonnalos]

<p>I believe that the GPU on the graphics card controls the speed of screen redraws (zooming, flick panning, etc) but not necessarily things like the clone tool or the crop tool. If things like full screen drag/flick pan/redraw are happening decently fast, then I don't think that your graphics card is the culprit. <br>

<br /> I built my machine from scratch (newegg.com) and just have a basic Vista 64bit install. I would guess that the biggest difference is the CPU. My clock speed is quite a bit higher than yours (3.6Ghz vs 2.2Ghz, mine is overclocked slightly) along with faster RAM (1066) and a larger processor cache. All this would account for a fair bit of the difference. On other thought is perhaps Gateway has a little more software "extras" installed that are bogging your machine down?<br>

<br /> I don't get any lag with the crop tool or clone tool displays. Opening folders in Vista is fast for me, even with a large amount of photos in the folder. Depending on the size of the folder and the size of the images it can take a while to build all the thumbnail previews. I think the green status bar on the top of the folder is actually a status bar for indexing the folder to use the quick search box in the top right corner. The folder contents should be instantly accessible though, even if the status bar or thumbnail previews are not finished.</p>

[bgelfand]

<p>Before you add a display card, be sure you have the latest drivers for the one you have.</p>

<p>Also see what bloatware Gateway may have installed on your machine. Go to Task Manager, then be sure to display the tasks for all users. Sort by CPU usage and then by paging.</p>

<p>Do you have two physical hard drives in your machine? If you do, be sure to place the Photoshop scratch file on the second drive to separate it from the Windows Page File. There is nothing like a little hard disk contention to bring everything to a halt.</p>

[bgelfand]

<p>You may be interested in this discussion on the Adobe Photoshop forum.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6f02c/46">http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6f02c/46</a></p>

<p>It seems others are having problems, so far 396 entries.</p>

<p>And here is another article in the Adobe Knowledge base</p>

<p><a href="http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404898&sliceId=2#vista64">http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404898&sliceId=2#vista64</a></p>

<p>This should give you some places to start looking.</p>

[rogleale]

<p>Hi Mark,<br>

Have you enabled the GPU usage in Edit > Preferences > Performance ?</p>

<p>Roger</p>

[tomwatt]

<p>CS4 runs appreciably well on my older 2.4gHz XP machines. I would be really concerned about glopware installed on your computer... everything Best Buy sells seems to come loaded with all sorts of conumer "values" that do annoying things... my mother got one of those swell things, and it was dialing up and connecting to remote places all by itself. A quick and easy scan for this stuff is called CCleaner (available as a free download). And like others suggested, enable the GPU as CS4 will access it.</p>

[bangengeman]

<p>Hi Mark,</p>

<p>I believe you are running the older, slower batch of the Phenoms (usually determined by 9x00 instead of the newer 9x50). There were a few bugs (too technical to explain -- google "TLB bug AMD") which somehow required motherboard makers to implement workarounds. Those workarounds pretty much translated into a 20% drop in performance. If you can still return it to Best Buy, please do so. If you plan on getting an AMD Phenom processor, get a 9x50 series. These had a lot of performance issues fixed, and seems be much more stable than the initial run of Phenoms.</p>

[peterbcarter]

<p>Sorry Paulo, it's the other way around. I have 6 boards in the office; 3 use 9600 and 3 use 9650. The 3 9650's kept crashing under vmware. I think 2 days was the maximum life span of the 9650. It was not until a bios update that had a new set of microcode to turn off (or fix) some memory management bits that the machine became stable. Among other things, it would lock under graphic activity; probably buslocks.</p>

[bangengeman]

<p>Peter, I did a quick re-check and the 9x50 series indeed was the fix. I had high expectations for the Phenom processor when it came out, only to find out about that bug. I reckon that the BIOS by the board was the issue -- I mean, they had to put some workarounds and probably that affected the newer series, right?. I'm not sure though if the workaround had affected the newer batch. Mind if I ask what board are we talking about?</p>

<p>Anyway, I just had time to wonder: Best Buy has an AMD Phenom 9500 as their fastest processor? I think you've been had (which is a complete understatement).</p>

[scott_turner]

<p><em>"Best Buy has an AMD Phenom 9500 as their fastest processor? I think you've been had (which is a complete understatement)."</em><br>

<br /> Indeed.  As I pointed out in another discussion on PS and the best processors to run it on - anyone even remotely considering any AMD processor should re-consider.  Benchmarks clearly show that even the fastest AMDs perform poorly with PS.  See, for example:  http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/Photoshop-CS-3,826.html</p>

<p>As others have noted,  I'm also wondering if part of the bottleneck isn't the graphics system.  With CS4, the graphics card now matters, and some are better supported than others.  Try editing with graphics acceleration turned on and then off.  If you don't have one of the more appropriate cards, you might find performance actually improves with it off.</p>

<p>Good luck,</p>

<p>Scott</p>

[marknagel]

<p>Brooks,<br>

Yes, I have 4 SATA HDs.  One deticated for scratch, two removable (not external for redundant BU).  I'll look for the Bloatware, but I dumped most of the slow down junk)<br>

Roger,<br>

Yes, GPU is enagled<br>

Paulo/Scott,<br>

Its outside of 15 days, so I'm stuck with it.  30 days ago when I bought it, it was the fastest.  I went on line and verified and did the comparison with the Intel chips they had.  I know the new line was released the next week, that's why this was on sale.  I'll try the graphic trick.<br>

Thanks,</p>

<p> </p>

[dean]

<p>Not sure if it would make a noticeable difference, but are you running Vista 64?</p>

[marknagel]

<p>Dean, it is Vista 64 bit.  I'm going to look for the bloatware tonight.</p>

<p>Thanks,</p>

[marknagel]

<p>Brooks,<br /> Here is a snapshot of my task manager, I thought I got it all.  Do you see something I missed?<br /> m</p>

<p>http://www.nagelhome.com/tm.jpg</p>

<p> </p>

[dean]

<p>It's that evil Itunes! :)</p>

[marknagel]

<p>OK I tried with the GPU switched on and off, and it does operate slightly faster withi t off.  I guess that means its the graphics card?</p>

<p>M</p>

[bgelfand]

<p>Hi Mark,</p>

<p>Nothing jumps out except you are display the processes for "Mark Nagel" only. Try clicking the button at the bottom labeled "Show processes from all users"; that will show everything running on the machine, except "root kits". </p>

<p>Next step, after check the "All Users" task manager is update the drivers. Unfortunately, I do not find an update for the Radeon HD3200 on the AMD/ATI web site. Exactly what Gateway machine do you have? What is the model number? If it is the LX6200 series, it uses SHARED graphic memory. That means the graphic processor shares main memory with the CPU and it is slower 800 MHz DDR2 memory. That could account for slow graphics. The last video update for the LX6200 was published by Gateway is version 8.452 released on 4/17/2008.</p>

[marknagel]

<p>Brooks,</p>

<p>Yes its an LX6200. I do have the current driver as well. I just ordered a NVidia 8800 GT. Hopefully this will help.</p>

<p>m</p>

[roamingstudio]

<p>If you feel like a little fun... then Vista Lite might be worthwhile looking at; although you need to be confident with the options you decide to disable. Basically it allows you to rip out unused parts of the OS; like legacy drivers for devices you never use.<br /> http://www.vlite.net/about.html<br /> There is also an XP version which I used (xplite) ; and it works fairly well keeping an old Dell PIII zipping along fairly nicely. What helps is to use the http://windizupdate.com/ to ensure you only update the necessary bits.<br /> NOTE: Do not use these tricks if you are at all unsure about what you are doing as it you have the potential to make your system (very) unstable.</p>

[ndt_photo]

<p>Is it still preferred to use a workstation card (Quadro, FireGL) vs. a gaming card (GeForce, Radeon) when using Photoshop and other graphics applications? (I know it still is for CAD/3D) I have a Geforce 7600 PCIe and it is listed as compatible with CS4 on Adobe's site but it gives me issues. It will work for animated zooming briefly then lock up. Or CS4 just flat out kicks me the error message about the GPU.<br>

Maybe upgrading to the 800GT isn't the route to go, have a look at a lower end FireGL or Quadro, they run $100-$130 over at newegg.</p>

[harry_spooner]

<p>Mark,<br>

For what it's worth, I stopped running CS4 on my MacBook Pro because it was also appreciably slower than CS3. I shoot an a lot of sports, and my workflow involves hundreds of images. I always shoot Raw. My flow involves bridge to CS. To my surprise, I crashed bridge many times with BR4, and my Mac hangs when I open too many images in CS4. This never happened in CS3. So while I really like the new features of CS4, I have stopped using it. It seems to very "bloaty" to me.<br>

Harry</p>

[marknagel]

<p>I just put a new Geforce 8800 in and its much better.<br>

Thanks!</p>

<p>m</p>