Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

When I started researching video / graphics boards I used the Adobe list of "tested boards". I also contacted Sony Tech Support for any information they could give me. The tech agent I got at Sony was very nice and very willing to help with motherboard and other compatiblity issues. I also had a lot of information that others had posted on this forum, and that really did help with the research.

I did an on-line search for several of the boards on the Adobe List and found the Radeon 3870 with 1 gig at a very, very good price. All things considered it was the biggest bang for the buck and a good long term investment. Should I replace this computer sometime in the near future, the Radeon board will simply migrate to the new computer.

This whole thing with CS4 has been a strange experience, I definitely learned that I will always be checking user forums BEFORE I upgrade anything.

I think the only thing that I would still condsider to be a failure on Adobe's part is that the real graphics requirements of CS4 were downplayed and glossed over in the promotion and ads for CS4. None of the major computer magazines seem to have picked up on it either. As end users we were left a little too much in the dark.

Jan D Curtis

Thanks for posting that Jan.

It's strange, in the old days reducing hardware acceleration was one of the first things to try with video problems but, with so many OpenGL problems flying around, the old standby has been all but forgotten.

Pity you forked out for the super duper card. Might come in handy for CS6 though! ;)

In the last couple of months I have posted twice to this forum. My first attempt to install CS4 failed, there were a number of display problems. Tech Support recommended updating to the latest driver for my graphics card. I did, it didn't help. Call #2 to tech support, I was told that my video card was not good enough to run the program, I would need to upgrade the videocard.

I was very hesitant to do that, I had already spent quite a bit of money on the CS4 Upgrade and on Lightroom 2 Full Version. Replacing a key piece of hardware in a system usually results in a chain reaction of other pieces of hardware needing to be replaced.

After completing some work projects that needed to be done, thinking about the video card issue (according to the product information on the Adobe website and product packaging, my video card was more than adequate), downloading and reading through all of the knowledge base articles on CS4 issues, and researching video boards; I decided to bite the bullet and ordered a Diamond ATI Radeon HD 3870 with 1 gig of ram I also had to upgrade my system power supply from 300 watt to a minimum 450 for the video board -- I chose a 650 watt. My husband installed the new hardware, not the easiest job to do and the system fired up, running as perfectly as ever. After about 2-3 weeks of normal use, just to be sure the system was OK with the hardware changes I decided to try reinstalling CS4.

The installation seemed to go perfectly, none of the previous display problems were present. I thought I was home free. Then I opened Gradients and Styles, they were a mess, I had 1 Gradient that appeared in all of the Gradient Boxes and 1 Style that appeared in each of the Style Boxes (working with defaults only on CS4). I tried everything I could think of to fix this mess, nothing worked, and to make matters worse, CS3 Gradients and Styles (approx 150 of them) did the same thing.

Back to Tech Support, where I got a very nice agent who tried everything he could think of, with no resolution to the problem. His advice was to uninstall CS4, uninstall CS3 and start over from scratch with nothing more than the virgin disk installation -- CS3 first and if it was working right, then CS4 -- if that worked right start adding in my collection of Gradients, Styles etc with any CS3 Plug-Ins being added last, one at a time. I did the uninstalls and reinstalled CS3, it did not work, the same problem with Styles and Gradients was there.

The next morning I call Tech Support and started one of the worst tech support experiences I have ever been through. From the first Tech Support Agent, who transferred me to someone else -- nobody could help. I was tranferred 6 times, disconnected several times and had to start over. Every call, every person, I had to repeat, name rank and serial number (mine) and the programs as well as restate the time-line and problems. My patience was at the breaking point and I really snapped at agent #5 so he hung up on me. Agent #6 was difficult to understand (accent) and that call ended badly with Agent 6 hanging up on me because I could not understand his accent and follow his instructions and asked to be transferred to someone with less accent.

Agent #7 -- I hit the gold mine -- his name was George and he was terrific, patient and knowledgable. He stayed with me on the phone for over two hours. We tried everything and could not get either CS3 or CS4 to work probably -- the problem with Styles and Gradients remained the same, no mattter what we did. George finally admitted that he had exhausted every idea he had and that he was going to have to hand me on up the tech food chain to a more experienced tech support person. I should receive a call with in 2 - 3 days. If you see this George, thank you so much for your time and patience.

I received a call from Adobe Tech Support the very next day. I lost the note with this agents name, he was also terrific, patient and knowledgeable. He had read all of the tech notes from George the previous day, connected to my computer via DSL and started troubleshooting. All I had to do was sit and watch and answer an occasionnal question. Within 15 minutes, this agent had determined the problem and fixed it. There was one adjustment that needed to be made to my graphics board -- hardware acceleration was sent to full and by slowing it down by just one mouse click, both CS3 and CS4 started working perfectly, all display, loading issues disappeared.

I know have both CS3 and CS4 installed on my system, both are carrying the full collections of Styles, Gradients, Actions and Brushes. Both are carrying all of my third party Plug-Ins (only one old Extensis Plug-In would not work on CS4 and had to be left out).

I have been trying out different things on CS4 each day and have experienced no significant problems. It is running at least as fast or faster than CS3, I have no lag, I can use Plug-Ins and the program has not crashed even once.

Since I was very down on Adobe and on CS4, I wanted to update the forum on my situation. The Adobe people canme through for their customer and got my problems fixed. CS4 is a beautiful product. Yes, it might need a little extra TLC for awhile, but what program release doesn't anymore?

My system is a 4 year old Sony Vaio Desktop
24" Samsung LCD Monitor
XP Pro with Service Pack 3
Intel Pentium 4 3.00 mhz processor
2 gigs of system ram
3 / 250 gig internal harddrives
1 / 500 gig External My Book Harddrive set up to receive Automatic Up To The Minute Backup of all file changes -- and weekly Norton Ghost Backup of the System C Drive and the two internal data only drives
new 650 watt Power Supply
new Diamond ATI Radeon HD 3870 Video Card with 1 gig ram

The system is happy and running great with its new hardware and software additions ........... and so am I.

CS4 Is A Disaster? ....... Not as much of a disaster as we might have thought .......

Jan D Curtis

Anthony, where did you find the list of specs that you posted?

Was actually the 4870 x2 that he turned off triple buffering. I have the same card yet I never had the option box checked in CCC.

Someone had pointed out that 'Triple buffering' was turned on in their nVidia prefs, when they turned it off, everything worked fine. Mine is turned off and it works fine.

Nick: Although I am reluctant to dump long lists of specs on this forum, I thought it just *might* be of use to show some info on my 1950 card. How does this compare with yours?

Anthony.

Model : Radeon X1950 Pro
VGA Compatible : No
Chipset
Model : R580
Bus
Type : PCIe
Version : 1.00
Width : x16 / x16
Speed : 2.5Gbps / 2.5Gbps
Video BIOS
Date of Manufacture : 10 November 2006
Version : 9XTB1EA.H1M
Direct3D Capabilities
Model : Radeon X1950 Pro
Physical Memory : 512MB
Total System Memory : 1.31GB
Direct3D Capabilities
Interface Version : 9.00
Model : Radeon X1950 Pro
Video Driver : atiumdag.dll
Library Version : 7.14.10.636
Has 3D Hardware Acceleration : Yes
Hardware Transform & Light : Yes
Heads : 1
Pixel Shaders Version : 3.00
Vertex Shaders Version : 3.00

Chipset drivers, BIOS updates?

It still sounds like a driver bug. But I don't understand why it shows reliably for some people/systems and not on others.

Anthony, it appears that my earlier response to you was deleted along with the Chris Cox "imposter" posts. Anyway, nope, still no solutions.

Seems to me that the fact that you're using the same card as me (is yours AGP? Mine is.) would indicate that the card itself is not to blame. Probably more likely it's something to do with how that card interacts with CS4 and the specific combination of the rest of my hardware/software set-up.

Let's put it this way: After working with Adobe engineers, as well as the good people who populate this forum, I am not optimistic that my missing-window content problem will be solved with this release of PS.

Nick