How many CPU cores can PS use?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
December 15, 2013
2 replies
69898 views

How many CPU cores can Photoshop CC (version 14.1) use at a max running on Mac OS X Mavericks‎? I have even looked into the PS tech specs but it only states multicore. Many thanks.

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Chris Cox

Legend

Photoshop uses all the cores it can, when it would speed up the operation.

But some operations slow down with additional cores, and some operations can't benefit from threading at all.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I 'think' the answer is as many as you can throw at it, but only with particular processes like some of the filters. I can easily see 6 cores in use, but only rarely all 12 threads with Photoshop, and never even close to maxing out CPU and memory. This is with a 3930k @4.2Ghz and 32Gb RAM with Windows 7. The GPU makes a difference nowadays of course. My system is a couple of years old and uses a GTX570 running at standard clock speed.

Other Adobe apps like Premiere Pro and After Effects will definitely gobble up all the system resources it can get its hands on.

PIXELREMIXAuthor

Participating Frequently

Ok yes 3D rendering in PS can use all of your cores there is no limit. But what about the filters that are multicore capable? How many cores can they use?

Chris Cox

Legend

Thanks for the feedback. Very much appreciated! So to sum up PS uses all cores yes - but its most of the times below 30-40% usage on all cores (from my experience). So it seems like the overall PS performance will not scale with the same factor as increasing your cores. The situations I experienced where all your cores are used with more than 70% are the mentioned "couple of blur and sharpen filters". What else operations (besides rendering) max out all your cores?

How the cores are utilized can depend on not just the operation, but also the size of the image, and the nature of the layers in the image. Sometimes just resizing can pin all the cores for a while, or filters like GBlur, UnsharpMask, etc. Some things like Radial Blur, and 3D rendering a extremely calculation intensive and show continued usage of all cores. But we're trying to move other computations to the GPU (which for some operations can be faster than all your CPU cores) - like the Blur Gallery filters.

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