Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

dave, at work we do not use drivers from the video card for either, and I have to say that the behavior of the LCD on generics is better than crts on generics. Both are perfectly adequate for our needs, but the range of options in generic on crts don't meet my needs in graphics. That has been a subject of interest some years back when crts ruled. I distinctly recall that when faced with generics vs drivers with the GUI for the card included, the advice was to only D/L the drivers. The generics were insufficient then, why are they sufficient now?

Maybe you are thinking of generics for the monitor.

> maybe for LCD, but for crts, generic drivers are good only for getting something on screen.

disagree. and they type of monitor has nothing to do with it.

Well, maybe for LCD, but for crts, generic drivers are good only for getting something on screen.

For all the others, avoid even opening the tabs leading to their gui, and if you do, don't touch a thing!

Gettcha every time. :-(

Actually I have been popping in here about once a week, no I haven't read every post, but I have spent quite a bit of time reading up here and other places, sorry I missed the generic driver comment, wasn't trying to say I solved everyone problems, just made a discovery of my own.

;)

Nobody ever reads post (-456)...

I think it was about a thousand posts ago I suggested using the generic driver to avoid the cleverness of the ATI or NVIDIA software. :(

Ive been lurking here for a while waiting for a solution and in upgrading to win vista ultimate sp1 I made a discovery, with the "generic" Microsoft display driver for my 8800 GTS, CS4 runs like a dream, with absolutely no lag during the circle test, also tried opening a vector image with several hundred layers I had been working on, and it was open in a second, no lag in zooming or panning. This is all without GPU enabled, it was greyed out in preferences. After I installed the Nvidia beta drivers (180.84) everything got laggy and slow as it has been from day one when I purchased Master Collection.

Also I have done a few clean installations to try to see if that was the problem, installing Photoshop before anything and testing after installing things. The other place where I noticed a small performance issue is after I installed the Wacom drivers for my Intuos and Cintiq there was slightly more lag with the brush tool. This time around I upgraded from Vista 64 home premium to Ultimate to take advantage of my second processor (2x dual core xeons) for some reason Windows let me use all of the cores with home Premium until started tinkering to fix Photoshop, so I had to upgrade to get them back, unfortunately it having the extra 2 cores makes zero improvement. I'm holding off on buying more ram too, using 1GB sticks I can go up to 16GB, but right now it doesn't seem like it will make CS4 move faster, so I am going to save my money, like I should have done with CS4 in the first place

specks:
Vista Ultimate SP1 64 bit
Dell Precision 690
2x Xeon 5060 3.2GHz
4 GB ram
EVGA 8800 GTS 640 MB
21" acer (1680*1050)
Cintiq 21UX (1600 * 1200)
Intuos 9*12
300 GB Velocoraptor 10,000 rpm for system drive
36GB and 74 GB Raptor dedicated scratch disks
AHCI is not enabled yet, issues with detecting them during install. Also no RAIDs or anything like that, maybe later with the 36GB Raptor as I have a spare.

Right on, dave! :-)