Photoshop CS2 setup on ultimate G5....
 

Please.... someone..... tell me what i'm doing wrong....:mad: :mad:

Getting slow/jerky sort of 'catch up' when cloning.... even small files (300MB). Also get slow redraw??

Just bought Dual 2.7 G5 with 8Gb RAM. I partitioned the internal to have a totally blank Scratch space/partition. Photoshop CS2 loaded on. Prefs set to: Use Maximum of 100% RAM, cache to 3, Version Cue Off, Export Clipboard off, primary scratch disk set to the one mentioned earlier.

Do i need a better graphics card.... i don't think i do.... but tell me different if so.

You might find this article at Bare Feats interesting. Make sure to read the entire article, including the Reader Feedback near the bottom.

What operating system are you using?

Trevor

I have read all those articles....

I have operating system 10.4.2

Don't give Photoshop more than 80% of available RAM or you WILL see it go very slow.

Photoshops memory usage implementation is very weak and lots of bugs such as this. Hopefully the next version of photoshop will finally be an Xcode build which will force them to fix all the crappie memory bugs. They will need to go Xcode anyway for Intel/PPC fat binary support. And hopefully as-well they use the new Acceleration Framework.

yeh.... if you have 8 GIG of ram set it to 50 or 60% Mem usage and it should be very happy.

Perhaps you should read it again, and rethink the cache size setting that you have set in Photoshop.

Trevor

Ok, tried everything....

still getting the same results even though i have changed the max RAM to 50% now.....

So..... i have taken this issue up with Adobe who have esculated the case to a level 2 !!

I also noted using Activity Viewer that even when opening up a 1Gb file the scratch disk was still being hit. - Not right...

Will post Adobe's comments when rung up in the morning.

Photo shop is a very big scratch disk user. But seems to only use 4GB/disk.

Also the "Cache Levels" in the pref controls many memory settings. Such as:-
Histogram Levels
Preview Levels
Healing & Clone brush calculation Levels
And a few more which I can not remember.

So if you have the RAM set it to like 6-7. Defaults to 4 or 5 and only on low RAM machines do you set it lower.

OK...........

Adobe got back to me, saying the setup i had is exactly the right/correct setup and to what Adobe would/could recommend.

They've now told me I should maybe try mapping some of the hardware RAM as a drive and use that as a primary scratch disk.... only trouble is....

HOW THE HELL DO I DO THAT !!! - Anyone??

they won't tell me how - fair enough

that sounds odd.....

it sounds like they are asking you to make a RAM disk.....

http://www.macupdate.com/search.php?...x=0&button.y=0

sounds like they are fobbing you off... hope your not paying for Adobe's support!

ALSO..... I am just reading your original post......

a 300mb file aint small..... thats HUGE.....

if I work on an image for our magazine that spans a double page spread they are only about 110mb!

How big is BIG if small is 300mb?

Yeah, i i used to think 300Mb was a big file before working with the highest-end of retouchers, we do retouching for massive 48sheet posters so a normal psd file saze is between 800Mb and 3Gb (honest!!). we just used a 300mb file for speed and easy on this test.

We are not paying for support luckily!!

I have sinse spoke with Adobe AGAIN!!!, saying that they should be sorting this out and not telling users to try the RAM disk thing. They have escalated the query to level 3 and i'm going to chat with some techy guy. I'm even going to say that it is a real problem and that i want it sorted (possibly a magazine article!!)

Having a scratch partition on the same physical disk as the OS and software is buying you NOTHING. The point of having it on another disk is to allow read/write in the scratch area independently of OS/application read/writes. You should add a second hard drive in the machine and use that for scratch space.

I've been playing with CS2 on a dual Opteron system and it seems to fly. I'd be curious to compare what you're doing on a file that large on it, if you want to share the file. I can't imagine where I'd get a graphic file that large otherwise. If you're interested, I have a number of machines I could try it on and compare with what you're seeing (OS X 10.3, 10.4, Linux/Gimp, Windows).

It's not hard to make a 300MB file. Just convert a full-scale RAW (6+ megapixel digltal camera) to 16-bit and add some layers, and you'll get there. Usually when people think of a smaller file they're thinking of a final flat cropped 8-bit.

yeah i realise having a second drive would be good for the primary scratch disk, but, having 8 GB RAM SHOULD be good enough!!! don't you think?!??!? So having a small partition of the boot disk just incase aint harming anything, it's just better than having a non-partitioned drive and Photoshop trying to write data where it finds space - which could be fragged areas of the drive.

And thanks for the offer.... i may take you up on that........

I'll say this again Photoshop is a heavy scratch disk user doesn't matter how much RAM you have.
But it will only use upto 4GB/disk.

And yes having a scratch disk on another drive does help. But if you are working on large files setup dedicated two main scratch disk on to separate drives of 4GB and have a third on some other partition ( does not matter which drive it is ).

I have worked on files over 3GB ( it was 3m x 14m and had to look perfect from only 6 feet away ). That 3GB file was done on a Dual 1.25GHz with 2GB RAM, Photoshop CS1 ( when it first can out ) and plenty of scratch space. BTW Photo only just managed to use all the ram ( only had 3 swap files )

Also when you are working on large files turn your history states down to like ?10.

Oh really? That's not how it sounds on some of the threads at the Adobe user boards where Photoshop engineers sometimes pop in and explain what they do and why they do it. It sounds like they are doing the best they can. For example, they explain why Core Image isn't all it's hyped up to be.

I wouldn't expect Adobe to be very interested in Core Image since it is Mac-only and they already have all the algorithms working for their cross-platform products.

Which threads are these?

Have you or they even tried Core Image?

I have tried Core Image on machines which aren't even using the GPU for acceleration, Core Image effects/filters are faster than their Photoshop cousins.

Also I'm pretty sure with Core Image/Video that if GPU acceleration is not available it falls back on the Accelerate framework which is processor independent because it contains both AltiVec and SSE low-level code.

Instead of Photoshops pretty lame attempt with the AltiVecCore.plugin, MultiProcessor Support.plugin and PPCCore.plugin . And if you don't beleve me just go open up the Activity Monitor and have a look how many threads Photoshop uses. Its less than Safari, Mail or even iChat. The best multi-threaded application in the CS is VersionCue and guess why? Because it really Apache Xerces and is not written by Adobe.

You don't think Adobe checks out relevant parts of the operating system? At all?

this is an example thread. There are others there.

From the explanations offered at the Adobe forums, it sounds as if many Mac users are judging CoreImage on perceived performance, but not actual performance or the actual quality and consistency of results. There is a similar buzz going on about Aperture: The pros are excited, but every one is hanging back to see what the actual output quality of the RAW processing is. Apple is great at demos, but sometimes they don't finish the job.

Final question: If Photoshop is so bad, where is the superior alternative? CoreImage has been out there for months, where is the faster, bug-free alternative? Shouldn't CoreImage have made it easy to build? Aperture isn't it, it can't do what Photoshop does.

Already read that thread. Those Adobe guys Chris Cox, Scott Byer and Marc Pawliger seem very sheepish on the issue.

Note they all are very quick to put down Core Image and the only explanation why not Core is by Scott how is wrong AGP 8x throughtput is 2.1GB/s and with PCI Express in the new G5s it is 4GB/s but its really the power of 16 pixel pipelines lines in the x800 GPU which are basiclly vector units even the new Dual CPU with Dual Core ( Now for the math a G5 core has 2 vector units so 2x2x2=? ) only has 8 and remember that with only one gpu ( using the new x850 and sli you'll get 4 GPU's each with 16 pixel pipelines) and photoshop currently doesn't make very good use of even 4 vector units in like a 2.7Ghz Dual G5 with 8GB of RAM it putts along at 60%-70% usage on even large files when doing tasks that are "Optimized" for the G5. I too have dealt with this.

And on the GPU issue go have a look at Evans & Sutherland they make Image proccessing equiment use ATI GPU's upto 64 GPUs in one box. They are used for every thing form flight simulators to Render Servers.

Also when Core Image is Hardware accelerated with the GPU its not like it only uses the GPU it does still use the CPU and its vector units.

Of course Adobe's programmers are going to poo-poo CoreImage! They didn't write it and already had all of it's features in PhotoShop. What makes CoreImage a value is that it makes it easier to write or port graphic intensive programs to the Mac platform and incorporate features that were previously Adobe only domain.

CoreAudio's been around awhile, and most professional sound software now uses it since it makes it a lot easier to implement those features. There are some sound programs that existed before CoreAudio, that don't use it though.

I think I recall reading some years ago that the Photoshop source code was something like 5 million lines of code. Such a program takes much more than "months" to develop.

Even if we were to make the assumption that using new technologies might reduce the number of lines of code to a mere half-million (500 KLOC), then (from the tables in Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development" book), the fastest possible time to write such an application would be about 20 months (with a team of 70 developers).

Note: the open-source graphics program "GIMP" had something like 400 KLOC in its 1.2 version. Presumably the latest versions are a lot more. And the GIMP of course uses the GTK which is now over 600 KLOC.

OK...... Finally........... Adobe have seen....!!!!!!!!!

I've been speaking with Adobe direct on this matter since i first posted the original thread. And after me running around 50 or so tests and giving them results back, they have now posted articles on their tech website.

Photoshop has a problem with images when the G5 has more than 4GB RAM installed.

See:

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/332969.html

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/w...4@.3bbe8599/39