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

I have tried turning off items, indeed turning off layers does help however when you have 100+ layeres and you need to move something you often need to move things compared to other layers so turning off layers is not an option!!!!

I use almost the latest MacPro and one of the fastest;

MacPro 2.93 dual processor six core (12 cores) with 48gb of main memory. my work files are on a 6 drive OCZ 256GB SSD RAID5 system and the video card is an ATI5770.

If my machine is underspecced I happily buy new things to solve this however, please tell me what that might be???? somehow I don't think swapping the 5770 for a 5870 or upping memory from 48gb to 96gb or even swapping processors for marginally faster XEONs will make a big difference....

IMO this is something that needs to be fixed, I can hardly imagine Adobe not being able to reproduce this.

BTW CS5.1 does not have this issue.

Maybe I didn't explain well, something can run as fluent at 80% load as it does on 10%, but no need to say the first one is suboptimal. It becomes easier to reach 100% and show slowdowns for a broader number of hardware. Only an example. And yes I know that the opposite is also possible, sluggish at either 80% or 10%, but then we would have been talking about incompatibilities and not simply power as I do.

I use XP SP3. So this is not going to help much because there doesn't exist any official driver for this card beyond version 266. It's just marketing politics that 9600GT is supported but the Mobile version "isn't", upon a guide I just reenabled support editing some flags. I don't know you can try with v.266, or the desktop card, or mobile with vista or seven, or simply another individual setup with similar issues. I'm not urged in my personal case.

Yes, I have plenty of benchmarking tools - but they only work if the slowdown exists on the machine I'm profiling. And this slowdown does not exist on any of our machines.

It's like you're asking me to count the fish in my swimming pool that has no fish. But in your lake, there are fish.

Anyway, what you're describing there is a slowdown due to your video card or drivers. The more UI you turn off, the less UI gets drawn and the less time your system spends waiting for the video card.

OK, you said you're using:
Core 2 Duo 2.53 and NVidia 9600M GT
drivers 301.42 for the 9600M GT

But you didn't tell us which OS version you were using.

We need to reproduce the setup and see if the drivers or card really are too slow in general, or if there might be some other factor involved.

Don't you guys have benchmarking tools? No need to spot slowdowns
Anyway, to sum it up.

"Graphics Processor" checkbox ON
-panning is sluggish in whatever combination of panel visibility (even just menu bar), smooth on all UI hidden.
-Zoom gets better as less panels are visible, but not good enough until all UI is off.

"Graphics Processor" checkbox OFF
-Panning is smooth and responsive, with all UI off it even gets subtly better (not very noticeable)
-Zoom is slow, if I turn off layer thumbnail preview, gets slightly better, if I switch to channel tab gets considerably better (no yet good though), from that point on hiding panels gets better at a point where having only the menu bar feels acceptable.

On my systems, I can't test to find the slowdown, because there is no slowdown -- which I already verified with a profiling tool before we shipped (but failed to test lots of layers, darnit), and reverified as soon as the UI became a suspect.

So, there is something about your system or prefs that makes the UI slower. Once you figure out which panel it is, we can work out more details, and hopefully help other people who see CS6 running slow.

lol calm down Chris, I'm trying to help you. You don't need a slowdown to know that the current UI is much hungrier (or nitpicking if you prefer) than before.
Except for the bright UI I'm very happy with my CS3 (it's starting to feel like good old XP).
If I disable "Use Graphics Processor" panning goes smooth, but zoom in/out is still slow, until I hide the whole UI. And I'm using drivers 301.42 for the 9600M GT. As I see it is just a problem about Card, Drivers and CS6 UI, just that.

Me doing tests won't help - I'm not seeing any slowdowns at all.

But since you are, you can try hiding one panel at a time to narrow down which is causing the slowdown on your system, then let us know. After that, we might be able to guess about causes and further narrow down the differences on your system.

Hello Chris, not really, in my case hiding layer thumbnail (or hiding the layers panel for that matter) doesn't make much difference (if any...) What does it is hiding the whole UI, it's like another world. Maybe you could run some UI performance tests. I use a Core 2 Duo 2.53 and 9600M GT card with updated drivers, it's not that bad of a machine.

We're working on a fix for the layer thumbnail problem.

Well there is a performance difference for me between no layer thumbnails and no layer panel shown ( no panel shown is faster ). Also, any idea when we can expect a fix for this issue?