How many CPU cores can PS use?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
December 15, 2013
2 replies
69897 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?

Noel Carboni

Legend

But there is more to it than that. No brush lag, a very responsive Liquify, generally snappy performance all round. If you think you might use Photoshop to edit video in the future, you will definitely be glad of all the system resources you have. You should also look at what functions use GPU acceleration, because that makes a difference nowadays.

BTW In case you are not aware of it, Chris Cox, who posted back up the thread, is on the Photoshop Development team, so his answers are definitive.

Every version gets a little better at using your computer hardware, because of course it's designed for (and on) ever more modern hardware.

I've got 24 logical processors, and some operations can pretty much peg them all. A favorite example "benchmark" test is to do a Radial Blur of a big image. It finished right before I caught this screen grab...

That said, always keep in mind that multi-threading may not be implemented equally in every corner of the software, and as Chris said, sometimes (e.g., with operations that are RAM-limited) using more cores can actually slow things down. I've recently been doing performance tuning leading to a release of my own software, and we actually reduced the thread count for some operations simply because they completed more quickly..

-Noel

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