First Look: Inside Photoshop CS3
Posted 03/25/2007 at 1:43pm
| by David Biedny
The Latest Intel-igence
Previous versions of Photoshop have worked reasonably well under Rosetta translation. But the fact is that anyone working with images consisting of more than a few layers - especially layers of several megabytes each - has likely experienced performance hits. With Intel-native CS3, the speed increases are significant. For our benchmarks, we used a 17-inch 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and compared it with a dual 2GHz G5 tower with 2GB of RAM. Our 39MB test image fit completely into RAM on both systems, taking the hard disk access speed out of the equation.
Taking into consideration that this is a beta version of CS3, we saw some awesome speed bumps on some operations, while others offered only nominal increases. Your own results may vary.
Radial Blur set to zoom effect at Best quality, amount = 30
> PowerPC Mac: 120 seconds
> Intel Mac: 47 seconds
> Speed Increase: 155%
Change image size by 500%
> PowerPC Mac: 127 seconds
> Intel Mac: 27 seconds
> Speed Increase: 371%
Smart Blur, radius = 10, threshold = 15, quality = High, mode = Normal
> PowerPC Mac: 83 seconds
> Intel Mac: 61 seconds
> Speed Increase: 37%
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