Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

To Adobe: CS4: This PC Redraws Slow

CS4 runs fast on my 3 year old cheap Dell laptop with 1/2Gig memory. CS4 runs slow on my desktop. My laptop has an old card so OpenGL isnt an option so its grayed out. My desktop is as follows:

Dell Dimension 2400
XP Home SP3 version2002 32-bit
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Upgraded to 2GB RAM
Replaced Radeon B200 which didnt have an OpenGL option. CS4 ran slow. Installed Radeon HD2400PRO, 256MB, 64-bit, which is on Adobes recommended card list. Updated driver dated Dec 10, 08. The 2400 is the best card my old PCI can run. Turned off all 3-D features.
20 monitor at 1600x1200
Open GL is working. All advanced settings tried on and all off. Turned off OpenGL.
Direct correlation between redraw speed and number of square inches a brush covers monitor when window is as large as possible. Size of brush in pixels unrelated. Example: a 300 pixel brush in a window thats 4x4 does not lag.
Uninstalled the following software that might form a shell: McAfee anti-virus and firewall, Spy Doctor, Startup Cop. No Photoshop plug-ins. The rest of the software is also on my laptop.
Also: set windows not to open as tabs, set cache to 4 and then to 8,
Desktop CS4 with Paint Brush with 4 rapid strokes edge to edge with a 7 diameter brush as measured on the monitor with a ruler with with an image filling a 9x13 window: Lag: 7 seconds
Desktop CS2: same process: Lag: 0 seconds
Laptop CS4: same process: Lag: 0 seconds

heartbreak ridge... maybe clint's best movie. my fav anyway...

Colonel Meyers: What's your assessment of this exercise?

Gunny Highway: It's a cluster f&ck.

Colonel Meyers: Say again?

Gunny Highway: Marines are fighting men, sir. They shouldn't be sitting around on their sorry as$es filling out request forms for equipment they should already have.

Add my voice to those waiting for the 'dot' release. Why complain in public if others are already doing such a good job ;-)

Sorry folks. I am not trying to belittle the problems a lot of forum users are having, nor to whitewash Adobe, who have obviously overlooked something serious in the testing and QA of the new features.

I just don't like drawing conclusions about how widespread problems are, based on a skewed sample.

It does make you wonder about the integrity of some Windows systems though doesn't it!

"Most people not having problems don't post on the forum"

I would counter with this:

Most people having problems with CS4 either don't don't know of this forum, or (most likely) don't know that the terrible lag problems are not normal.

Quite a few buyers of Adobe suites are not buying it primarily for Photoshop. They may be web designers or video editors who only occasionally need Photoshop for incidental graphics. They may simply think that Photoshop lags by default, or that they don't use it often enough to raise a fuss about it.

My own informal survey of Photoshop PS4 users, including 2 in Hong Kong, 1 in Toronto and 1 in New Jersey, is that all of us are experiencing noticeably poor performance compared to CS3. So that's a 100 percent fail rate for CS4. Okay, a sampling of only 4, but if the problem in CS4 was somehow random, then at least 1 of us should be having no issues. Of the 4, only 1 of us is raising the issue on this forum (me), since the others know I'm kvetching about it, so they don't bother.

I respectfully suggest to Chris and Adam that if Adobe can't find a user with the problem within driving distance of their office, Adobe should find the budget to send an engineer to visit some of us who do have the problem, to inspect our systems and reproduce the issues. It's been way too long now for Chris to keep reporting "we can't reproduce the symptoms on our systems". So find some paying customer's system who CAN reproduce the symptoms!

> Nick Decker, "Photoshop CS4 is a disaster" #535, 1 Jan 2009 5:21 pm
>Adobe knows that there are problems, regardless of the Adobe faithful, that chime in that it's working fine for them. They, the faithful, only have the right combination of hardware and software. Myself, I think they're in the minority. Look around on the web, other than here. You will see that CS4 is f@cked up.

---

I don't think adobe is denying it's their problem; it's just not hteir problem exclusively. They are trying to find out who is having trouble and why:

Chris Cox, "CS4 lag. What graphic card will it take?" #182, 17 Dec 2008 5:08 pm ;
Adobe Photoshop Engineer
ProArtist - I am saying that some of it is driver related, some of it may be Photoshop, and some of it we have no idea what's going on (mostly because we can't reproduce the symptoms on our systems).

>the company attitude that if a new software product won't work with existing new hardware it is the hardware's fault entirely just plain sucks.

Well said, Fred.

Adobe knows that there are problems, regardless of the Adobe faithful, that chime in that it's working fine for them. They, the faithful, only have the right combination of hardware and software. Myself, I think they're in the minority. Look around on the web, other than here. You will see that CS4 is f@cked up.

I've said it before. I'm glad that it's working for some of you, but for me, with a machine that meets all requirements, it doesn't work as advertised!

I'll add my voice to the complaints. This is the first version of Photoshop I've ever had regular crashes with. It is also the first program in Vista I haven't been able to remove from Task Manager - applications (I go to Processes). It crashes when I save files mostly. Jpgs, Tiffs. Whatever. I've only had it a week and am amazed how slow it is. It is so dramatically different than CS3, I'm surprised. I have a Nvidia 7600 GT 512MB vid card. Vista SP1, 2GB RAM, lots of HD space. DualCore2.6.

I'm not noticing much difference using OpenGL checked and unchecked. Not sure what to try first.

Well anyone with the word expert in their name most assuredly is not one.

And I must agree with John and the others that the few complaining of problems, whats the count now? Ten? eleven? out of the tens of thousands or more copies sold just means that there's a few people out there with lemons for computers.

You can't blame that on Adobe.

I begrudgingly agree with EH on this - there was officially "no problem" with CS3's "fix" for CS2's not broken printing, which was then "fixed" as an understated part of the CS3 0.0.1 patch which was only released after a howl of protest, and with this CS3 fix (and fix of the fix) having completely disappeared from CS4, which now runs like an improvement on CS2 printing.

Maybe I sound like a stuck record on this, but if nobody had complained - and had kept complaining - many owners of large format printers in particular would still be battling the unpredictable mess and materials attrition that CS3 printing caused them when they upgraded to CS4, and new owners of CS4 would be scratching their heads trying to work the unfathomable out.

While I'm not seeking to apportion blame yet, and note that my 5-year-old non gpu compatible machine runs what it can of CS4 quickly with stability, the company attitude that if a new software product won't work with existing new hardware it is the hardware's fault entirely just plain sucks.

It never used to be that way with Adobe in the early days when the customer always came first.