CS6 beta speed

Question

  One question about CS6 - I'm using beta now and really disappointed with speed of saving files in ACR module. If in CS5 it was 4 files in row and my 2600K was loaded at 96 - 98%  constantly - in CS6 beta its one file and CPU load jumping from 50 to 90% result -  2 or 3 hours to save 1500 files against one hour or less in CS5 (same PC - near top - 2600K 16 Gb RAM, SSD SLC for system, adobe cache on 10K rpm WD  HDD, Win 7 64 bit). What about commercial version?

Answer 1

The new Camera Raw is a little slower to do the actual conversions - no question.
I expect the improved conversion quality (e.g., more perfect CA removal, better shadow/highlight retention, etc.) to come at some computational cost...  There's no reason to think that everything that's newer should also be faster, especially not when it has new features and produces better results.  You can be sure the previous versions were highly optimized, making them tough to beat.
I have several versions of Photoshop on the same workstation, a dual quad core Xeon x5460 system (8 cores total)...  Here's a comparison of my conversion times:
Times to convert 50 Canon .CR2 raw files converted to 6144 x 4096 x 16 bits/channel PSD files:
Photoshop CS6 x64, Camera Raw 7.1 RC set for PV2012:  237 seconds (4.7 seconds per file)
Photoshop CS5 x64, Camera Raw 6.7 set for PV2010:  159 seconds (3.2 seconds per file)
Photoshop CS4 x64, Camera Raw 5.7: 103 seconds (2.1 seconds per file)
Each file in the newer version seems to take about 1.5 times as long as the previous version to convert, which is quite acceptable from my perspective given the increases in image quality.
Guess we're going to have to start thinking of dumping these old, slow systems and getting some really powerful computers. 
-Noel