Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Just an fyi that you may find interesting.

I have a dual boot Hackintosh PC with a Quad Core Q9300 CPU, 8GB Ram and Nvidea 9800GT video card running both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 64 bit.

I've consistently found Photoshop to be much faster and not crash when dealing with large image files when using the Mac operating system compared to Windows until now that is.

I ran some test working on a large image file over 1GB in size with multiple layers in Photoshop CS4 under both operating systems and was quite surprised by the results. The 64 bit PC version of CS4 (sorry no TWAIN scanner support) is significantly faster than CS4 with the same file on Snow Leopard. A PS function that took 26 seconds on the Mac, only took 6 seconds on the PC. Also no crashes when working with large files for a couple of days, something I could not do for more than a few hours under Vista.

The performance difference can be explained by the fact that Adobe did not ship a 64 bit version of Photoshop for the Mac, only 32 bit. The real difference maker is the fact that the PC 64 bit version of Photoshop shipping for PC's let's it break the 4GB barrier for the first time. In my settings I've now let the PC Photoshop use 6+ GB of computer memory, so the large image, all actions, undo history tracking, etc that Photoshop needs and does are all being done in sytem memory rather than having to page back and fourth to the hard drive.

Quite a performance difference and makes working with large image files a real joy for the first time. Eventually Adobe may get around to rewriting the code as 64 bit for the Mac, but I know they are quite unhappy with Apple for not supporting Flash in their iPad. Now if Adobe ever rewrote the code for Linux to get back at Apple that would be a real game changer.

I should get off my butt and upgrade to win7 x64
Thanks for the review/test info

FYI CS5 will be 64 bit on the Mac, Intel Only.

For what it's worth I'm running CS4 64 on a PC with 4gigs ram Win7 64 and it is a lot faster than the 32 bit version .. happy camper here.

Have you enabled video card acceleration for both in the options? It's one of the biggest benefits of CS4 for me, and the image effects are much nicer.

How do you go about enabling this.. I thought it would automatically do it if the video card had the option. Where is the setting??

Yes video acceleration is enabled in the settings as the Mac recognized the Nvidea card and all of it's rendering options appear in the CS 4 settings.

Look under the Performance option under Settings in Photoshop to see them Matt if your video card supports the extra functions.

for some reason all I can think of are: "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials

personally, I've run CS4 on dual and quad Intel PC machines, and I don't really find they are as peppy as most Mac machines.

To be honest, I think that CS apps run better on the PowerPC chipsets... for example, i'm still using a G4 dual 1.0ghz to do some processing here and there... not large batch, but just the touch ups. THe larger batches, I run it on beefier machines at work

I've always found better performance on Macs than on PCs

I'm the complete opposite... In my 8 or 9 years of using both Macs and PCs for video and photo applications I have never, not once, found a Mac that I would describe as "peppy"

I've used CS4 on both a mac platform and PC, and honestly.... I can't tell the difference. My new laptop doesn't do too bad of a job with CS4, and its a PC.

This may be a better question, how many times as a PC Photoshop crashed more on you than a Mac Photoshop ? ?

heh heh

I'm still for Mac FTW but these days, hardware is so much faster, that it almost becomes a moot argument.

I've had plenty of Macs crash, so I believe it's a fallacy that Macs don't crash.

The biggest reason why PCs crash more is the bigger variety of hardware out there that Windows has to run on vs. Mac hardware which mostly comes from the same company that makes the OS.

Another issue is having cheap hardware. For instance when my PC had Kingston RAM in it, it would crash daily, but when I changed the RAM my PC just wouldn't crash...I eventually found out it was the RAM that was defective and it wasn't Windows' fault. And I push my desktop to do everything including video and audio editing, which is a LOT more intensive than photo editing.

Are you sure that all 4 cores are running in Windows? Run MSCONFIG, select BOOT, then ADVANCED. Look at "Number of Processors."

Depends... do you count the Spinning Beach Ball Of Death as a "crash" or merely "having a nap"?

Lol!

I know it was due to a hardware incompatibility with the first G5s and the Aja Kona video I/O boxes we were using, but man did I ever have a frustrating time at school.... Two or three kernel panics and a few "spinning beach balls of death" a night were par for the course until a few OS updates and firmware revisions were released. That semester pretty much shattered the "macs never crash" myth for many of us

I can't believe what I am NOT reading.
Such a polite bunch you lot are!! Back home in England a Mac vs. Windows thread would end up in an endless flame war. This seems a right civil board.

On this forum we have Canon vs. Nikon flame wars!

Or we are just being polite Canadians....

don't you mean all Olympus owners are.........

Hay ................... Yap you have got the point!

hahaha.... is it on the war level already? ..