Adobe Photoshop CS4 - Terrible Performance

ScarySquirrel · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:12

Hi all,

I downloaded the CS4 trial and for the first couple of days it was fantastic. I used it to do a couple of skins for cars in Live for Speed and it was great.

After the first couple of days the performance suddenly took a massive nose dive. Even with only one document open (in this case it was 2048x2048 pixels - Maybe 20-30 layers) it is incredibly slow. I notice this mostly when resizing things. I hit CTRL+T and if I then drag one of the corners it isn't smooth, it is very jerky whilst resizing.

My specs:

E8400 @ 3.6Ghz
4Gb PC8500 RAM
Radeon 4870 1Gb
Windows 7 64bit Build 7077

Could it be because of Windows 7?

Thanks in advance.

reflux · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:15

Is it using hardware acceleration with your video card?

vcl_X1 · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:44

Have you allocted 75% memory to cs4?

Also how fast and empty is the scratch disc? sudden slow down is often related to scratch disc use, test this by restarting the machine and clearing what you can from the scratch disc, if performance returns to normal then...

ScarySquirrel · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:47

reflux said:
Is it using hardware acceleration with your video card?

I believe it is yes. Would this cause slow down?

vcl_X1 said:
Have you allocted 75% memory to cs4?

Also how fast and empty is the scratch disc? sudden slow down is often related to scratch disc use, test this by restarting the machine and clearing what you can from the scratch disc, if performance returns to normal then...

Not entirely sure what you mean as I have not heard of a scratch disk before but I will do a bit of a Google and see what I can find.

Thanks

EDIT: Found this link. Not read it yet but hopefully it will help - http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404439

reflux · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:52

ScarySquirrel said:
I believe it is yes. Would this cause slow down?

CS4's inbuilt hardware acceleration is supposed to make manipulating large images quicker, because it does some of the work on the video card. So it should run better if it's enabled.

Scratch disks are basically page files for Photoshop.

Pho · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:55

With ATi are you able to set per-application video options? I had to customise Photoshop and drop a lot of the advanced settings down (anti-aliasing, multisampling etc) to make it run smoother.

ScarySquirrel · 27 Apr 2009 at 10:58

Pho said:
With ATi are you able to set per-application video options? I had to customise Photoshop and drop a lot of the advanced settings down (anti-aliasing, multisampling etc) to make it run smoother.

Good idea, I'll check that when I get home as well.

Thanks