Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

[_ProArtist_]

I'm am just at a loss of words.

What a mess. It could not be any slower. What were you thinking Adobe?

You ripped apart the code just to add GPU support for what? To provide worse performance?

Make sure you DL the demo first... CS4 is a disaster.

The latest hardware cant even run it smoothly... Dont tell me its graphic drivers.

[_Q_Photo_]

ProArtist
I hope this is helpful. Most interesting thing I've discovered concerns brush lag.

It is not possible to run Ps window MAXIMIZED and on two monitors. Window must be made smaller and then drag right edge to second monitor. I'm always using Ps on two monitors.

I have absolutely no drawing skills, sorry to say. Photo manipulation is my area. I stand by my statement that I have no (or very little) problem with lag.

Doing curves color adjustment was real time.Photo over 500 megs.

HOWEVER, I noticed a lag doing your continuous circle test. I was making the circle at a really fast pace. I don't think in actual practice most people would move that fast. At any rate, there was lag that did increase. Doing strokes, long or short, showed no lag. This was all with a mouse, Microsoft Wireless Laser 5000. This lag was at 100% view. At 25%, 50% and 66% there was no real lag.

Now for the interesting part. When doing circles with a Wacom pen (low end) there was no lag at all.

I pretty much have only one complaint about this new HP computer. There is something strange about how the mouse works. That includes the original wired mouse and the wireless that I added. After closing a program there is often a 5 or 6 second period of time that the mouse is not responsive.

Good luck. I don't like to hear that someone is having problems with Photoshop. Much like seeing a homeless person and thinking "There but for the grace of God...."

Q

[Hudechrome-sd9sPI]

I have seen that unresponsive mouse at a number of places where a big transition is occurring. During bootup comes to mind, that the mouse will pause for short periods while the process finishes.

[_Q_Photo_]

Thanks for info, Lawrence. It's not a big deal to me but I was surprised to encounter that behavior on a new computer. Never experienced it on older XP machine.

As far as boot-up is concerned, I make it a habit to start computer and touch nothing until I'm sure it has completed booting. Just a habit of mine that probably has no basis.

Q

[Hudechrome-sd9sPI]

With XP, when the first bootup after instal occurs, the mouse will freeze on the log in page until the initial configuration is finished. First time I saw that I freaked! It can take a while, which is why I became concerned.

[mom2one]

>This was all with a mouse, Microsoft Wireless Laser 5000. This lag was at 100% view. At 25%, 50% and 66% there was no real lag. Now for the interesting part. When doing circles with a Wacom pen (low end) there was no lag at all.

Curiously, this is something I have found and have reported with the new test build of CS4. I have the Wacom Intuos 3 w/latest drivers and my mouse is the standard MS wireless mouse/keyboard. No intellipoint drivers installed.

[_Daniel_nieto_]

Look at the Forums index and find my post called something like Rx for a slow clone tool in cs4. i posted dec29

[_Mark_John_Murphy_]

Is Adobe close to a fix yet? Some entries that I read on this forum seem to suggest that the folks having the performance lag problem with CS4 are in the minority. No way can this be true. I suspect it is the other way around. We need to start an excel spreadsheet showing opsys and equipment, with the final two columns being CS4 RUNS GREAT and CS4 RUNS LIKE CRAP. I believe that there would be more checkmarks in the runs like crap column for sure. I have two machines, purchased last December from a small outfit called Dell that may have sold one or two of the same machines to others....a dell xps 1330 and dell vostro 400, each with plenty of processor and memory, both running xp sp3 ... CS3 runs like a dream ... CS4 has the performance / lag problems mentioned in this thread. I don't want to do a bunch of testing, turning things on and off, etc. I want Adobe to fix whatever is wrong with CS4 so that it runs like a dream on these recently purchased machines the same way that CS3 does. Right now, the Adobe take seems to be that (probably) millions of machines out there need to be fixed to work with CS4. No, no, no ... CS4 needs to be fixed to work with the machines. And please, no arguments about all the variables with all the windows machines out there ... they managed to get CS3 to work didn't they? They can do the same with CS4, even if they have to reverse their decision to mess with the GPU. I will check back periodically, but like many others I have given up for now and will not upgrade until they have things fixed. I am an Adobe stockholder so I really do hope that they come up with a fix soon because the sales decrease caused by this problem is going to cause further erosion in the stock price.

[_Rudolph_Wijburg_]

I found CS4 unusable, mainly because of enormous brush lag. I found a solution that works for me: enabling palette snooping in the BIOS. See my message http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b76749

Happy New Year,

Rudolph

[Guest]

Mark John Murphy

At the risk of repeating what has been posted many times:

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

[_Expert_Here_]

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

Means nothing. It's true most people don't even know of this place, or if they did, wouldn't know how to get here. The point is, most people here are having problems, and not "how do I", but rather, "it doesn't work". It's not isolated, but wide spread. It is a real problem for most people. I know, I am after all,

Expert Here

[Fred_Nirque]

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.

[Guest]

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.

[_Bob_Bob_]

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.

[Guest]

>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!

[Michael D Sullivan]

> 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).

[Walter Elias]

"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!

[Guest]

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!

[_Russell_Proulx_]

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

[Guest]

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.

[_Daniel_nieto_]

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

[Hudechrome-sd9sPI]

Right on, dave! :-)

[_Sean_F_]

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.

[Guest]

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. :(

[shoot_me_now-d3u3se]

Nobody ever reads post (-456)...

[Guest]

;)