Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

Well, Chris, if getting CS4 to run properly will require me to turn off the OpenGL features, then I might as well have not upgraded. And had I known this, I would not have done so.

Mike - the round brush cursor and SFW are both due to known driver bugs (probably an Nvidia card). Please update your drivers. If updating the drivers does not solve the problem, then contact the video card maker.

Daniel, I've just emailed you my dxdiag info.

Nick

Wayne - we are interested in quality, and we do more testing than any other product I know of. But, especially with the GPUs, there are too many variables.

And just because a bug description is short, does not mean it is accurate, or simple, or that it could have been caught in testing. "Processors with Pentium4 mask revision 3 and unpatched BIOS versions lock up for several seconds when running threaded code."

And right now, we have absolutely no idea why the nonGPU case is running slow or showing problems -- it should be the same as CS3, and was in all our tests.

Greetings all,

If those of you that have the lag problem could run "dxdiag" and then email that text file to danielatadobedotcom I would like to run through some of the data.

- In the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, click Start, and then click Run.
- In the Run dialog box, type: dxdiag ( Click OK to run)
- A dialog box displays System and display info
- Save All information (or at least System and display information)

Thanks for your feed back...

Disaster? I'm of two minds:

The retired system engineer in me is delighted that there are so many defects on which to do problem determination. What's delightful is the complete unreliability of the PS (and Windows) code. Sometimes you do A, B, & C and X happens; sometimes not. The two areas I have in mind are the new GPU 'support' and the old as the hills but still unreliable pen pressure support. Adobe can't make the new functionality right and can get the old functionality to work reliably. A techie's dream - a complete mess.

The professional photographer in me is completely appalled. I'm spending so much time with the tools that I'm getting very little real work done.

I do wish that Adobe & Microsoft (among many) were less interested in speed and ever so much more interested in quality. Any bug in a shipping product that can be completely described in ONE simple, short sentence means that they just don't care (or aren't up to the work at all).

How about more engineers and many, many fewer pieces of suited overhead.

Not yet. Just spent the morning setting up a fresh XP Sp3 box. I'll spend the day cycling video cards in and out of the box to see if I can repro (starting with the cards people have reported as problematic).

Not using tablet on my MSI m670.Never had troubles with CS3, but in ver4 met:

1) slow working
2) already mentioned, brush round disappears, leaving small part - no way to define where you're painting >(
3) in PNG "Save for web" dither and color masks disappeared
4) interface got worse and tabs names take more space, and there's no way (tick) to stop menus from hiding some

Btw, InDesign isn't better also ;)
God bless I've tried the trial first. Will be looking for CS3 again.

Adam/Chris

Another factor in some aspects of the lag may be file size and number of layers. I know some users use huge files and dozens (or hundreds) of layers.

I know some symptoms of the lag also occur independently of these factors but everything needs to be taken into account.

Pro Artist, "Latest" is almost meaningless, please state the exact version, maybe also the firmware version of your videocard.
Some other users reported a big bost when updating directX, don't know if it is related.

Please give all info that Adam requests.