CS4 very slow vs. CS3

Question

I have been doing large layouts in photoshop for years for the film and advertising industry.  I have recently started using cs4 and found it to be pretty much unusable when working with large layered files.  I have followed several tutorials on increasing and optimizing speed, turning off acceleration, etc.  I have checked my graphic card drivers and it is still a dinosaur compared to cs3 on my Nehalem macpro.  I have also reproduced the same results on my older Harpertown macpro.  Redraw, tweaking curves and drawing with the lasso are all very slow.  I have two friends who have the same experience and downgraded back to cs3. I have one friend who claims it works fine on his xp64 system.
Are there any artists who really use this program on mac for serious work? -or have most people abandoned it and gone back to cs3?  I have found cs4 to be pretty much unusable.
BTW, can somebody please update the curves tool???  It would be nice to zoom, have independent bezier handles, and also be able to invert curves like many other programs have been able to do for years.  It is quite silly that photoshop has one of the most primitive curve tools in the industry.

Answer 1

robotpaper wrote:
Nope.  I do a ton of maya, c4d and zbrush.  I have had no issues with either of my nvidia cards (8800 and GT 120).
If you are saying CS4 doesnt support either of those cards that is rediculous [sic].
Ridiculous is not knowing how to spell ridiculous.
Hey, I'm just trying to help.
I don't see any "GT 120" on the list.  The 8800GS and 8800GT are on the list, both with 512MB of VRAM.
I hope you're talking about two different machines.  Photoshop does not support more than one card on a given machine, and two different video cards on the same machine spells crashville.
Apple's support for multiple or dual graphics cards seems to be very poor.  Many users with two cards report all kinds of trouble.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405711.html
This is a list of graphics display cards that were tested
by Adobe before release of Photoshop CS4. They are listed by operating
system, and with the amount of video RAM that was on the card during
testing.
Mac OS graphics display cards We tested the below cards on Mac OS 10.5.4 and 10.4.11.
The following cards were tested only on Mac OS 10.5.4: 8800GT, iMac 8800 GS, and 8600M.
MACTEL iMac 8800 GS 512 MB
      MACTEL 8800 GT 512 MB
      MACTEL Radeon x1900 512MB
      MACTEL nVidia Quadrofx 4500 512MB
      MACTEL nVidia 8600M 256MB
      PPC nVidia 7800 256MB
      MACTEL ATI HD 2600 MAC 256MB
      17" MACTEL iMac x1600 128MB
      Macbook Air intel GMA X3100
Q. Why can't Photoshop take advantage of more than one display card?          
       A. When you move an image window between two monitors that are each on a separate display card, the GPU attached to the second monitor does not have access to the data necessary to accelerate drawing. The SLI and Crossfire technologies that use more than one GPU to speed up full-screen games will not work with Photoshop, because their use is limited by design to accelerate only full-screen games.
from: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404898.html
Finally:
25. Jun 10, 2009 10:55 PM in response to:                                     captainlang
Re: OpenGL & 3 or more monitors
Paul,
Dual video cards = crashes in all cases.
Matching Dual Video Cards = few occasional crashes.
Non-matching video cards = crashes consistently
I really don't think the GL features factor into it that much. It's the Apple video drivers. The OS simply is not well-designed for multiple video cards in a video-intense application. As I've posted, I run dual 8800 cards and still have about 2 crashes an 8 hour day. Crashes generally occur when doing the most rudimentary things, like dragging a layer between two documents. I simply save more often. The 11.0.1 update helped a bit, but not completely. And CS3 never crashed with dual 7300s installed.
from:  http://forums.adobe.com/message/2030437#2030437