P: CS6 Slow compared to CS5.1 with large files

Machine: Macbook Air, Intel 1.8 core i7, 4 gb RAM mac osx 10.7.4. Video card (as listed in PS prefs) Intel HD graphics 3000 OpenGL Engine.

When I disable the GPU in prefs, the pan becomes smoother (but ever so slightly less responsive. By this, I mean that there is a slight delay between dragging with the hand tool and movement. The movement itself is smooth.).

Cache tile size changes don't seem to have any effect.

I have also tried closing all other programs but nothing external seems to be affecting this problem.

Can we assume from this that there is some issue between my Macbook Air's GPU and this problem I am seeing?

The hand tool is just dependent on the video card redrawing part of the screen - so that's a good test.

What GPU?
What machine model?
Does the behavior change if you disable the GPU in preferences?

Hmm, what else might affect that....
Does changing the tile size in preferences change the behavior?

Chris,

I have been using ps cs6 this weekend on my macbook air extensively and can also confirm that I am seeing a 'jagged' pan (read: slow and choppy) when using the hand tool. When performing a test of the same file with cs5, pans happen smoothly and quickly.

Hiding and showing panels makes no difference.

This machine is a 1.8 i7, 4 gigs of ram, mac osx 10.7.4

We cannot fix what we've never seen. It sounds like you have something else going on, and we don't know what yet.

First, we need to rule out third party plugins, then external applications and utilities. Try disabling any third party plugins you have installed, and make sure you didn't copy any plugins from a previous version of Photoshop, or use the "additional plugins folder" preference to point to a previous version.

The graphics artifacts could mean that the problem is related to the GPU in some way, and the lag sounds like event handling or redraw slowdowns.

Also, check your activity monitor and see what other processes are running and taking a lot of CPU time (you may need to set it to show "all processes").

I did write turning off layers, not turning off the layer thumbs. I will check whether turning off the thumb does the trick and get back.

Again, as you can read here and in other topics - we know about the layer thumbnail slowdown. For a temporary workaround, turn off the layer thumbnails. We're working on a fix.

Beyond that, we have not seen any slowdowns that weren't explained by third party software (plugins, anti-virus, drivers, etc.).

If you have a slowdown after turning off layer thumbnails, then we need more information to reproduce the problem.

p.s. Turning off layer thumbnails didn't fix it for me at all.

Again - you're seeing it take longer to redraw than CS5 did. I'm not seeing that, at all. I do not see a slowdown on any of my systems - thus I cannot diagnose a slowdown using my systems. 80% versus 10% doesn't matter -- on my systems CS6 takes the same amount of time and CPU usage as CS5 did.

If you're using XP, then the GPU settings can't be enabled in Photoshop CS6 - they are always disabled on XP (because we know the drivers don't work correctly, and the OS has bugs that will never be fixed).

I'm having the same problems and it has costed my whole Sunday afternoon doing tests and trying to fix the issue. Just purchased Creative Cloud and didn't have the same performance problems with CS5.

I'm on a 2010 iMac i5 with 8 gb ram, Lion 10.7.4. I've tried different cache settings, turning off layer thumbnails, turning off OpenGL, but nothing helped. Panning is very slow, switching from normal mode to fullscreen with menu mode also lag (also some graphical artifacts for a few seconds). Switching tools also lag. I switch from normal mode to fullscreen mode a lot and use the OpenGL interactive zooming A LOT, I really can't live without the OpenGL zoom mode. It will make my process very slow, which means I will lose time / lose money! Also turning off layer thumbnails is not a solution, it makes the layers very small, very hard to select the layers and hard to see.

I tested it with a website I've designed. 1200x1600 px, 16 mb file with many layer groups, vector shapes and type. PS is completely unusable for me at this stage.

I will need to switch back to CS5 for now in order to get my work done, this is really disappointing and I hope Adobe fixes this very soon!!

Note: Turning off layer thumbnails didn't fix it for me at all.

My OS is Snow Leopard completely updated. The files I typically have issues with are really large. 9000x7000, 100 something layers and over 4gb large (psb). With smaller files I do not particularly notice a slow down.