Photoshop CS3 Beta On iMac Core 2 Duo
Adobe made available the Photoshop CS3 Beta last December 15. Like any good Photoshop and Mac user I went ahead and downloaded it. Excited to try it on our iMac Core 2 Duo. I wanted to see how well it would perform compared to the CS2 which is still emulated via Rosetta.
Photoshop CS3 is available as a 685 MB download. It’s twice the size of its windows counterpart becasue it contains both Power PC and Intel Binaries.. Woohoo! Universal Binary baby! You need an Adobe ID to download it. It’s free and painless to get.
To use the CS3 beta you need a valid CS2 serial number which you will then use in the Adobe web site to get a new serial number to enter in CS3. Otherwise you’re only allowed to try it for 2 days.
So after downloading it, I proceeded to install it on our iMac 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo with the stock 1GB RAM. Installing is a simple process. Got that over without a hitch.
Now, I didn’t have that much time to play with it today, being a Saturday and all I had other things to do, like catch up on some sleep I’ve been sorely lacking. Having a cough isn’t helping as well. So I decided to just run a speed test to compare it with the CS2.
I downloaded Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test. Set up both CS2 and CS3 for the test and ran it. CS2 clocked in at 4 mins and 26.8 seconds. While CS3 is a little faster at 3 mins 56.8 seconds. It’s faster but I was hoping it would be much faster. Ok, ok it’s a beta version… Still the speed improvement on the speed test is a welcome one. Launching the app was a different story though. CS3 took just 12 seconds to launch versus 33 seconds for CS2. More than twice as fast.
I’ve also managed to try some simple stuff with it. Zoom, crop, scroll big images. It all seems smoother and quicker. So I’m not really sure why the speed test showed only a 30 second improvement over CS2. Judging from every day task it seems quicker and more responsive.
So far CS3 has been stable on the iMac but like I said, I’ve only tried it for awhile. So I will play with it some more over the next few days. I’ll also install it on my Powerbook G4 and see how it performs. I just need to clear some disk space.. Damn 80GB hard drive. You’re sooo small!!!
Since this blog is not a Photoshop blog I’ll leave the Photoshop centric reviews to others. I’m just concerned about how Photoshop runs on the Intel Macs as opposed to really discussing its features one by one. Scott Kelby of Photoshop TV has a good quick look at CS 3. You can also get a first look from Macworld.
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POSTED IN: Apple News, Apps, Juan's Posts, Reviews, iMac
3 opinions for Photoshop CS3 Beta On iMac Core 2 Duo
James Snyder
Dec 16, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Did you run with a history set to 1 & cache levels set to 4?
I just ran that on my C2D MacBook with 2 GB ram, and got a time of 1:03 for CS3 doing two runs in a row, using second score. Doing the same for CS2, I get 2:31 (first score was quite high, like 4 minutes).
When working with a lot of ram OS X can take a while to shift around memory caches and whatnot especially when switching between one app using a lot of memory, and having a large amount of stuff from disk cached in RAM.
That said, even though this benchmark shows almost a 250% performance improvement, I’d say the perceptual speed improvement is even better. That, and, Rosetta isn’t bad at ALL. Of course, probable the best comparison would be between rosetta and native performance for CS3 alone, which could eliminate performance differences between versions
James Snyder
Dec 16, 2006 at 3:12 pm
I get 6:30 for Rosetta CS3 performance. I’m guessing that it’s maxing out on memory and paging like crazy, so I don’t think that’s indicative of raw Rosetta CPU performance.
Juan
Dec 17, 2006 at 3:28 am
Hi James,
Yes I set history to 1 and cache levels to 4. I guess the 2GB Ram really helps in speeding things up. I will try running the tests again. This time I’m going to average three runs.
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