[X4U] Negligible speed bumps...

[Zane H. Healy]

At 11:44 AM -0700 3/8/09, zapcat wrote:
>judging by the trajectory which adobe software offerings are on, you 
>will NEED the biggest, baddest machine you can get your hands on to 
>see decent performance.

I'm looking in part at when I upgrade my Nikon D300.  The 12-15MB RAW 
files from the D300 are bad enough.  Have you seen how large the RAW 
files from a Nikon D3X are?  They're something like 130MB each.

>I'm using CS4 right now on the MBP of 2008 with 4GB RAM, and I kid 
>you not, I would be far happier and far more productive with pre-CS 
>offerings of Photoshop and Illustrator, and a copy of Quark Express.
>
>I kid you not.

I don't doubt it.  I have a G5 2x2 with 7GB of RAM, and most of the 
time I'm using Adobe Lightroom 2, and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. 
At times it feels sluggish.  Of course part of my problem is that I 
run a couple other apps that are *VERY* RAM intensive, *AND* I hate 
to take the time to reboot.

I'd recommend taking a look at an article in the latest issue of 
"Photo Techniques" (March/April 2009), it has advice for systems such 
as you.  Namely get an eSATA card, and put your Photoshop swap on an 
external RAID for speed.  You can't take 8GB in that model can you? 
That is the other big performance boost.

What I can't wait is to get Lightroom 2 on an Intel box, so I can run 
it as a 64-bit app.

>I have been using adobe products for about 20 years...never thought 
>I'd come to regard their products as 3rd-rate shareware.
>
>but..here we are...

It's worth remembering these are Professional Apps, as such you 
should expect to have to run them on professional *desktop* hardware. 
Laptops and consumer machines aren't the best suited for things like 
Photoshop, though the laptops are slowly getting there.

It isn't simply Photoshop I need more speed for, what I really need 
it for is the 3rd party Photoshop plugins.

Zane



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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
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