How to make Photoshop run faster?

[racingpinarello]

I just built a new system, and finally having it up and running. It's an AMD 64 3.2mhz system with 2mg of RAM and I'm going to buy another 2mg tonight. It has an ATI FireGL 128 workstation graphics card.

Overall, the system runs about the same as my old system which had an untimely death, which is surprising.That system had a P4 2.8ghz with only 1mg ram.

What are some secrets to make screen refresh run faster? When I work with my medium format scans the original files are huge, and get bigger with adjustments.

Are there hard drive / raid solutions? I read that Adobe can only access 2mg of ram, is that really true?

Any help would be appreciated.

Loren

[Peter_AUS]

Remember Loren,

You are using 32bit software on a 64bit machine, so therefore the machine is stepping backwards to support the software.

I did mention at the time you were looking to get a new machine, and understand the fact you needed to do something about it, about a new chip comming out. Well it should be out in June/July and it is able to do two processors at once on the chip, so it is essentially a dual processor on one chip. So can Virus scan using one Process and Photoshop on the other process, without degrading the machine, which is what happens currently.

Things to look at with Photoshop, where are the scratch disks, don't make the scratch disk the same as where the program is located, so on a two drive system, then the scratch disk would be drive D.

Another thing you could do seeing you are getting more memory, is make RAM disk about 2G and use that, but that does become a little dangerous if your machine crashes or suddenly reboots, as all the data is lost off of the drive.

RAID setup involving 2 seperate drives does enhance machines, but essentially will have nothing to improve the video output/rewrite of screens.

SCSI drives are faster as well, and don't forget SATA drives as well. Partitioning large drives to smaller drives makes accessing files faster as well.

You can increase the performance of your video screen, but lowering the amount of colours you have it setup for. Generally most people set it up for the highest number of colours, which lowers the speed of the video card, as it has more colours to process. So try dropping it back to 24bit and see if that helps with that issue.

There is a physically speed limit that computers hit at present which should improve in the next few months, and you may have just hit that limit.

You might be correct about Photoshop and the memory, limit but there is a new version comming out in May which has some siginficant advancements in it, and I think that issue would have been addressed, haven't seen it mentioned, but did notice that it handles 32bit files, so that should indicate some sort of memory change up.

Hope that helps a bit.

[Erik Stiegler]

I read that Adobe can only access 2mg of ram, is that really true?

It's true at least with the Macintosh version.

Just in case you aren't aware of it, in the memory & image cache preferences in Photoshop is a setting that limits the maximum amount of memory Photoshop will use. The default setting is very low. You can improve performance significantly by increasing that so Photoshop isn't always going to the scratch disk with large files.

[92135011]

dont use the history

[Arctirus]

If you don't feel like setting up a raid array western digital raptors are basically just as good or better than standard drives on raid. They are 10,000 rpm sata with 4.5 ms seek times. Just be prepared to spend $175 for a 73gb drive. I have one of those as my system / temp drive and a raid1 of 7200 rpm 250 gb hitachis with 8.5 ms seek times as my storage array. I would have gotten raptors for that too but 73 gb is the biggest they are currently made.

I too have an A64 system and just installed windows xp 64 bit. It's not available to the public yet but it's nice! Even 32 bit apps run better on a 64 bit os than they do on a 32 bit os.

Does anyone know if the scratch disk location can be moved in ps cs? Also are there settings to adjust the ram it used on pc or is that only a mac thing?

[Trevor Ash]

dont use the history

Yeah that. It makes a big difference if you're having memory problems. If you're not having memory problems then maybe you won't notice.

That 2GB thing you heard about is an OS/Hardware constraint. What's the largest value you can hold in a 32 bit integer? The answer is about 2GB. This doesn't mean that having more than 2GB is a waste because each application has their own 2GB memory limit they can address memory in. 3GB is a good number, 2 for photoshop if you want and the other 1GB will get consumed by everything else.

Here's a not so unknown secret: your machine is only as fast as it's slowest component.

I'm willing to bet something about your IO is holding you back such as slowish hard drives, memory speeds, etc. Your processor is obviously very capable.

Did you buy a complete system or put it together yourself? If a complete system, what is it? If put together yourself, what are the exact parts you bought (manufacturer/model)?

What exactly do you mean when you say you want the screen to refresh faster? That's a little ambiguous. Is this something you only see in photoshop? You shouldn't be having problems with the amount of time it takes the video card to paint the screen. If that truly is the problem then something's wrong with your video card, drivers, or installation of it all. I suspect by refresh you're probably talking about something else though. Maybe the refresh rate on your monitor is set really low? Right click on desktop and choose properties and you can find the current refresh rate of your monitor in there somewhere. If it's anything at or less than 60hz then it's probably running kinda low. I wouldn't lower the color depth like peter recommended except to see if it makes a substantial difference...in which case I'd still thing something could be wrong with the card. Today's card's just don't have problems with 32bit color depth like they did 6-7 years ago.

I'm not the expert these days but so far as I know there isn't any software to take advantage of the 64 bit hardware. It starts with the OS and I think microsoft has a 64 bit version of XP or server 2003 hiding out there somewhere but even then Photoshop isn't written to support any advantages of 64 bit. So, you're a little ahead of the times here.

[Lionheart]

Does anyone know if the scratch disk location can be moved in ps cs? Also are there settings to adjust the ram it used on pc or is that only a mac thing?

Click "preferences" then "plug-ins and scratch disks". btw, the more automated actions and plug-ins you have, the longer it takes to load ps, because all these are loaded at startup. Yes, a faster hard drive or RAID would help, or go to a SCSI arrangement for your hard drives since ps loads up pretty much everything at startup.

[racingpinarello]

Hi Trevor,

I think you hit the nail on the head with the weakest link I/O issue. Last night I added a SATA 35mb western digital Raptor internal drive which runs at 10K rpm. Before I was using an external firewire drive as my primary scratch disk.

So far the system is much faster.

What I meant by screen refresh, was everytime I did an edit it would take a long time to process the edit (i.e. cloning tool, etc) and be ready for another change.

I do plan on adding more memory to a max of 4mb which should allow photoshop to have a full 2mb to itself.

Thanks everybody for your help.

Loren

[GB1]

I wonder what your BUS speed is too? What type of motherboard (MB) do you have?

Another VERY GOOD source of info would be animation sites. Animation rendering is the mother-of-all slowpokes. Those guys are very very aware of what it takes to speed up a system. I can't recommend any sites off the top of my head but I'm sure there's plenty out there. GL