P: Performance problems iMac Retina 5k

Report · Jan 26, 2015

I've been using the new imac retina, and i have enormous problems with the performance of Photoshop. If i for example use the selective color correction, this does not run smoothly. Other functions also work delayed. I noticed if i do not use Photoshop in full screen mode, everything goes back to normal. A friend used the predecessor model imac without 5k resolution, but has no problems. I suspect Photoshop has problems with the resolution of 5k. I hope Adobe fix this problems because Photoshop works slow and delayed, the performance is terrible. I bought the retina iMac 5k, since my previous mac is getting old and slow. But now is it so, that my new retina iMac, run equal slowly as my old iMac. Adobe please fix this problems, so i cannot work.

Report · Jun 11, 2015

Is it really Apple issue? It's easy to say like that. I run a lot of Apple apps including pro apps and no performance issues at all. (iMac 5K, 4GHz i7 8GB Ram, 256SSD, Radeon 295X 4GB)

Report · Jun 11, 2015

Really?
Is it really Apple issue? It's easy to say like that. I run a lot of Apple apps including pro apps and no performance issues at all. (iMac 5K, 4GHz i7 8GB Ram, 256SSD, Radeon 295X 4GB)

Report · Jun 11, 2015

No, it takes a lot of time to debug and test the OS issues in order to say that. Oh, and we actually did spend that time to track down Apple's OS bugs.

Report · Jun 15, 2015

Share :
I had trouble with Imac 5K with Photoshop CC too. PS CC 2014 kept crashed out on each filter may be related to VGA AMD Radeon (OSX 10.10.3 does not help).

I had tried installed MAC OSX 10.11 El Caption Beta.
Glad it sold the problem. PS CC 2014 work well.
Anyone stucked in MAC OSX Yosemite may have a try with OSX 10.11 Beta El Captain.

Tintin
PS: Now NTFS For MAC 12 worked well with OSX 10.10.3 Yosemite not stucked with OSX 10.11 El Captain Beta. I hope Paragon would support new OSX soon.

Report · Jul 20, 2015

Crazy !! i bought a new 5k machine for let the photoshop run more smoothly, but now i need to turn off the ruler !!

Report · Aug 13, 2015

Me too! I have got this problem also, i got lag when dragging the vector graphics right to left, when i release the graphic, it came back to the starting position if your action is too fast. And also sometimes the number pad is not working when input numbers such as width, height...

Report · Aug 13, 2015

I've been holding off for 6 months on purchasing a retina iMac. I see above where the problem has been identified by Adobe, but no word on a fix.

Does this problem involve Photoshop CC 2015 as well?

Report · Aug 13, 2015

Yes, these issues were worked around and fixed in CC 2015 (and another in the 2015.0.1 update).

Report · Aug 14, 2015

1. What about a fix for PSE 13, which also has problems on 5K iMacs (see my previous post above)? There is literally no way to get support for that product any more, so I have to ask here if whatever problem was found with CC was also present and fixed in some as yet unreleased update to PSE 13.

2. Why all the finger pointing at Apple when it now seems there was a fix to Adobe software (at least for CC)?

The lack of response from Adobe when there is clearly a major bug that was reported over six months ago is not OK. I'll remember that and will tell friends who ask about Adobe software.

Report · Aug 14, 2015

We worked around some known Apple bugs, and fixed a few of our own bugs (not directly related to the original topic, but which also caused slowdowns).

Apple still needs to fix their OS bugs.

Report · Aug 20, 2015

I'm having the same problem with my two 5k iMac's and the machine is already 10.10.4 c'mon apple!

Report · Sep 01, 2015

Ive had my 5K iMac for almost a year now and have wasted countless hours trying to get it to perform like advertised. Still nothing but lagging brush strokes and black and white boxes. I am now trying to figure how to recoup my losses. It blows my mind that products can be sold with out actually working. I feel like a sucker.

Report · Sep 01, 2015

Did you install the Photoshop CC 2015.0.1 update?

And have you told Apple about these issues with MacOS that are affecting your work?

Report · Sep 01, 2015

Thank you Chris for replying.

1. Why hasn't there been an update to PSE 13 on Mac? Why just CC?

2. You've said in other replies that Adobe has told Apple about it, and probably in more detail than any of us could. Plus, the problem doesn't appear with any other application. So I've reported it to Adobe (at least within the limited parameters for reporting problems to Adobe). And, as I have stated earlier, if I close the organizer the editor works fine. Terrible workflow, but it does allow editing. (I have PSE 13 on a PC also and it doesn't have this problem.) Conclusion: the iMac problem starts with Adobe, who should take the lead in getting it fixed within Adobe or with Apple. It would also be nice if there were some reporting back to us that the problem has been identified and will be fixed. Your replies are appreciated, but I don't take them as official.

3. How do we request a complimentary copy of the next version of PSE/PRE? I think those of us suffering through its shortcomings (at least on 5K iMacs - I've reported three major bugs, plus the slide editor is a joke) deserve what I hope will be a version with the problems corrected.

Report · Sep 01, 2015

1) Because they are two different products, on two different schedules.

2) The more Apple hears about the problems from customers, the sooner they are likely to fix the OS bugs. We can inform Apple about their OS bugs, but we cannot give you details of those bug reports or any status until Apple officially releases the fix for the OS bugs.

Report · Sep 02, 2015

I have everything updated. I also have called apple several times about the situation. They believe the problem is with the 3rd party software. I bought the computer because I needed to primarily use Adobe software with the beautiful 5k resolution of the iMac as advertised for professional photographers. Maxed it out with 4 GHz Intel Core i7 Processor, 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 AMD Memory, Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB Graphics Card, cost me over $5000. I have been paying $50 a month for Adobe software for almost a year now.. and it still doesn't work. I've spent countless hours trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong, lost clients and creditability because of the issues. I have literally been in tears over this. My chest frigging hurts from stressing over the whole thing. I don't know what to do.

Report · Sep 02, 2015

BTW, Thanks for responding Chris. I know this is some complicated stuff and you're trying to resolve it.

Report · Feb 25, 2016

Hello everyone. Allow me to tell you my "performance story"...

Until 2 weeks ago I was using a

MacBook Pro mid 2012, retina
16GB RAM
2,7 GHz Core i7 processor.
750GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB
OS X El Capitan 10.11.3
Adobe Creative Cloud - applications always up to date
Using mostly Lightroom and Photoshop (I'm a photographer, that's my job & passion)

Well, this is a pretty decent computer, but over the last couple of months or a year it has been running progressively slower and slower when running Lightroom. Photoshop was behaving more or less OK having in mind the specs and age of the MAC. But eventually Lightroom became so slow, I cant even describe the slowness. I as looking at the spinning wheel more time than working on an image. Lightroom was slow in all modules. Normally I also have Mail and Safari opened and some times Photoshop. Back in time, some 6 months ago, I first started closing one of those apps to slightly improve LR's performance. Then I had to start closing all applications and only leave LR running. My computer became a dedicated machine to Lightroom, only to try and have some work done at the end of the day.

Strangely enough, there was always free RAM (I use Bjango's iStat Menus to constantly monitor RAM and CPU in the OS's menu bar)...some times as much as 25%-40% free RAM. But Lightroom was behaving as if there was none.

So a few weeks ago I decided that my old pal the MacBook Pro has to be retired, although he was performing VERY WELL with all other applications...But I understand that Adobe applications are complex image editing power softwares and resource hungry. So I did a huge investment in the latest and greatest, fully loaded iMac...

Two weeks ago I received my iMac and I've been using it intensively ever since, doing my observations and taking notes. And after 2 weeks I had to reach out to the forums and cry out my frustrations. Because there are such...and as I see, I'm not alone...First the iMac's specs:

iMac 5k, late 2015 model, 27", fully tuned and loaded with
64GB RAM;
4,0 GHz Core i7;
1TB SSD (no fusion drive) by the way it's 4x faster in read & write times than my old MacBook Pro. Performance was measured with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test v. 2.2.2 and the iMac's SSD exceeds the scale with over 1200MB/s write and 1900MB/s read speeds;
AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB;
OS X El Capitan 10.11.3
Adobe Creative Cloud - applications always up to date (currently LR CC is 2015.4, CR is 9.4, PS is 2015.1.2)

Well, overall performance is better, indeed. But it's far from what I expected. Don't get me wrong -- the iMac is performing AMAZINGLY well with all other applications. But with Lightroom I still see the spinning wheel a lot of times. For the folders with images that I'm currently working on I render full resolution 1:1 previews + Smart Previews (so in fact I'm working on the internal iMac SSD). Rendering edits lags. The spot removal tool is so badly slow and lagging, that I prefer to export the file to Photoshop and clean it there. How is this possible?

Before I get asked let me answer: yes, I do use the graphics processor (the option is selected). I tried both options.

Now regarding Photoshop:

I don't use it as much and as often as Lightroom, but I did notice that when opening the application, it takes about 35 seconds to get through the welcome screen and to be able to use the program. Some times it takes longer, which is about the same time it took to load Photoshop on my old MBPro. How can this be normal? On another note Adobe Premiere some times takes more that 60 sec to load, Illustrator 20 sec, Indesign 15 sec...

The big, scary problem with Photoshop CC 2015 is this:

I noticed a serious scaling artefacts in Photoshop CC 2015.1.2. This is horrible and scary. The artefacts are not immediately evident in busy pictures, but in uniform B&W photos, the bug is obvious. To showcase the problem I'm using a grayscale image. I did a lot of experiments and reached to the following conclusions:

This only seems to be happening with 16 bit images. I cannot reproduce the artefacts with 8 bit & 32bit images in all situations (but I work entirely with 16bit RAW images as they come like this out of the camera, so this IS a problem for me);
This only happens when the background is a layer. Even if it's just a single layer;
The pattern varies - some times its made up of squares, other times rectangles and other times squares & rectangles overlap, like in the examples below;
If the background is flattened, the artefacts do not occur when resizing (upscaling or downscaling);
The artefacts are much more pronounced if the rescaling is done to an uneven number of pixels. For example, resizing from 3000pix wide to 2111pix is much worse than resizing to 2000pix;
The problem appears to be only an "illusion", because when exporting, the preview and resulting JPG's on disk are OK. See images 4A & 4B below. But this is still a problem, because working on files with such overlaid artefacts is very distracting and...scary

IMAGE 1: normal file before downsizing, 16bit (as mentioned, this does not happen with 8bit and 32bit images, nor with flattened images). Background is a layer:

IMAGE 2A: after resizing (Image > Image Size...). Notice the "grid" artefact:

IMAGE 2B: Same as 2A above, but with exaggerated brightness to better show the pattern:

IMAGE 3A: Same as example 2, but slightly zoomed in to show details of the pattern:

IMAGE 3B: Same as 3A above, but with exaggerated brightness to better show the pattern:

IMAGE 4A: On export (Fale > Export > Save For Web (Legacy)...) the preview is OK, but notice the original file behind the dialogue window is not OK:

IMAGE 4B: Same as 4A above, but with exaggerated brightness to better show the pattern:

That's all for now. I hope Adobe will look into this issues.

Regards,

Kostadin Luchansky

KDL [at] angolaimagebank.com

http://www.angolaimagebank.com

Report · Feb 25, 2016

Something is wrong. InDesign usually takes about 30+ seconds to load, and Photoshop should load in under 10 seconds on that system. Double check that you aren't loading a ton of third party plugins or presets in Photoshop (which take time to scan on disk).

The scaling artifacts are due to a bug in the video card driver. Changing the GPU mode to "basic" should avoid that until Apple can fix the driver code.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

It turned out it is not a photoshop only problem. This problem is related to ALL creative tool, also music programs like Ableton and even Logic X! My i mac is right now at the repair and i had the call from them just another minute, that we all will have to wait until Apple comes up with a new Logic Board driver which hopefully solves the problem. I mean that guy literally confirmed that the iMac 5K is not not capable of running any creative Application without hangouts, spinning wheel and mostly followed by the log message: WindowServer[]: GPU Driver appears to be hung (over 5 continuous seconds of unreadiness)

Report · Mar 03, 2016

That is very interesting. It's the first concrete possible explanation of the cause I've heard. Can you provide more information? When you refer to creative applications do you mean Adobe CC products or something more general? You mention both logic board driver and GPU driver. Do you know which is the problem? Do you know if Apple knows about or has acknowledged this as a problem? Finally, do you know where there is more information on this on the Internet? Thanks very much for any further information you can give us.

Report · Mar 03, 2016

When i refer to the creative applications i refer to the information I've been told by this particular apple retail store. I cant tell where he got it from, and i my self use only audio applications, but noticed that the problem is not limited to Logic but occurs with every audio application i used. In my humble opinion the only special driver those application need is core audio, but he told that there are some special UI elements (maybe quarz) involved as well. The thing with the logicbord driver is also surprising to me and might be only used by the OS it self, but he also told that a downgrade of El Capitan would not solve the problem. I started a thread at apple support community, where i described everything quite in detail: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7482196 lets hope that someone comes up with a real solution.

Report · Mar 08, 2016

Same Problem here, I just bought my 5K iMac a month ago and it's slower than my old 2010 iMac !! Please we need help here.

Report · Mar 10, 2016

I had a kind of break thru the other evening. I've been told by Apple to remove all parts which do not come from Apple and see if the problem still occurs. The only part which was not original Apple hardware (beside the thunderbold audio interface) was the additional RAM build in by the Apple retailer directly. So i never had a chance to compare the iMac with and without additional RAM. Once it get removed the Problem
disappeared nearly completely! Before the freezes was multiple times a minute after the removal of the additional Block i had only one short freeze with the log error massage: WindowServer: GPU Driver appears to be hung

Report · Mar 10, 2016

The video driver issue is a known problem on the iMac 5k. Apple is working to fix that in an OS update. And yes, out of spec. RAM could cause odd slowdowns (and worse).