Hi all!

I just came across an interesting post by Adobe's Principal Product Manager for Photoshop on the performace of the 64bit verions of the new CS5.

If any of you are considering the upgrade, it definitely looks worthwhile!

Below is the info from John's post.
The orginal is available here...

Photoshop CS5 64-bit benchmarks...

Running Photoshop in 64-bit mode produces some big improvements when using large data sets (scenarios where you'd otherwise run out of RAM and have to hit virtual memory). Here are benchmarks from a 2 x 2.66GHz quad-core Nehalem Mac Pro with 12GB of RAM (OS X 10.6.3):

Running the Retouch Artists Speed Test:

CS4: 36.09 secs

CS5 64bit: 14.78 secs


2.4 times faster*

Running the diglloyd benchmark Actions for Photoshop:

diglloydSpeed1

CS4: 38.05 secs

CS5: 23.1 secs

1.7 times faster

diglloydSmall

CS4: 56.01 secs

CS5: 26.48 secs

2.1 times faster

diglloydMedium

CS4: 120.15 secs

CS5: 83.85 secs

1.4 times faster

Opening a large (3.75GB) PSB file

CS4: 80.33 secs

CS5: 52.43 secs

1.5 times faster

Obviously these are big, big wins for any Photoshop users working with large images. I do however want to be careful not to oversell the benefits of 64-bit. As I've said from the start, 64-bit is a really big deal when you're using large amounts of memory. Otherwise it's not likely to make a very noticeable difference (e.g. your Web design tasks won't run twice as fast).

What about other Creative Suite apps? As I've mentioned, After Effects & Premiere Pro are both 64-bit native on both Mac & Windows (64-bit only, in fact, unlike Photoshop). I haven't seen benchmarks yet, but given the data-intensive nature of video, the wins should be huge. Meanwhile Illustrator has raised the limits on RAM usage, from 2GB in CS4 to 3-4GB (depending on system configuration) in CS5.

* I'm using the same "times faster" nomenclature that Apple uses when talking about 64-bit performance on Snow Leopard. If you prefer to think in percentages, the operations are (from top to bottom above) 59%, 39%, 53%, 30%, 35% faster than CS4, respectively.

By John Nack

As always, don't hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have, or assistance needed, and thank you for reading.

Have a great day!

Nimer Jaber

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nimer@nimer.com.au

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