Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

My non-adobe email:

travlin_adam at yahoo dot com

-Adam

Adam, I would love to help troubleshoot this. How to I get hold of you? (I already have my NVIDIA settings as you note)

ProArtist, I tried your settings and while they helped a bit on the chopped graphics when dragting one image over the other (still not usable though) the pen lag and other general slogginess remains the same.

C.Morley: Here's an update, we've been working on the issue since it was first reported and we're still looking for volunteers to help us test a change that may improve performance. If you're interested in helping you can email me directly.

Also, we found a possible workaround (nVidia only) for the issue of images not redrawing or drawing incorrectly when moved:

In the NVIDIA Control Panel:

Advanced -> Geforce/Quadro tab -> Start NVIDIA Control Panel -> Advanced Settings
-> Manage 3D Settings -> Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration

Set to Compatibility performance mode

Note that in my case this setting is on by default for PS CS4 after installing the latest drivers for the 8800 GT (YMMV).

-Adam

C.Morley

Try my OpenGL settings that i posted a few posts up. Let us know if anything improves.

I've got a room full of DELL workstations ranging from Optiplex 745's to DELL Precision 690's with 4 gigs of ram. ALL boxes have NVIDIA cards including several with Quadro FX 3500s with the latest drivers. ALL installs of CS4 show the same (terrible) slowness and choppiness when moving images over top each other. All settings have also been toggled with no change.

As a test, we have one system with an ATI card and performace is just as bad as all the other machines.

As another test, I pulled one of our machines from the network and also killed every single process including McAfee. Performance still very poor.

I'm reluctant to spend more time troubleshooting this for one simple reason: CS3 works perfectly on every single machine we have and CS4 doesn't. That tells me that the problem is caused by something Adobe did. Whether or not the new GPU coding uncovered an existing underlying issue with video cards is not my concern. I'm loath to change our corporate environment to attempt to fix a problem we did not cause. An easier solution for us would be to just return all 20+ copies of our CS4 suites.

Do any of the engineers have any more updates for us?

Systems are WinXP SP2/SP3 with latest direct X updates and latest Video drivers.

Hello
Apologies for returning to this, but I have just done the benchmark
on my son's tiny Samsung laptop with a 12in screen.
It uses Vista, has a 2.4ghz core 2 dual T8200 and 3 gb of ram.
It did the benchmark in 47secs, using the internal 5400rpm drive.
83% of available ram used by CS4. Vista uses over 1Gb of the 3GB and has 80 processes running.
I'm amazed. I might as well buy a little laptop!

Mike Engles

Hugh,
I've not edited the ini, just selected apps and services from the available menu. There's really nothing left running when SmartClose is done that I want to terminate anyway.

There are other utilites that perform the same sort of function, some more aggresive than others. Here are three more that you might want to check out (I can't endorse them because I haven't used them).

http://www.rsdsoft.com/task_killer/index.php4

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/index.html#CloseMany

http://orangelampsoftware.com/products_killprocess.php

Ho,

Thanks for the SmartClose hint. Really a great find. Thanks for passing it along.

It appears you can edit the ini to modify what gets closed. Have you added services to the ini?

H

There is a thread on OGL [specifically nVidia] settings, but transportable. I posted a link to it about a week ago.

I agree, this thread is now getting too complex to navigate. Maybe the moderators should close this one and folks split the topics into sperate threads.

I have now seen four sets of nVidia settings. I used the ones from the other thread and they were helpful.

Maybe a comparison experiment against the various settings?

Anyone got some free time?

H

No problem guys.

I will probably post another message with those settings in a new thread for folks to try. They will probably get lost in this thread other wise.

Glad they helped for some