Photoshop CS3 Universal Binary - Test #1 (w/screencast)

I have nothing but praise for the beta, Universal version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that I’ve been using for several days. I like the modifications to the palettes (they no longer get lost like they used to) and there appear to be a lot of little niceties added to the program. As a web developer, I’ll probably never use the most powerful of Photoshop’s features, but I have been very, very satisfied with the number one reason for this upgrade: performance.

I originally bought an iMac G5. This was a great machine, until it died. After several months of wrangling with the local Apple store, I was given an otherwise equivalent 2Ghz iMac Core Duo. As a geek and web developer, I was pleased with this – now I got to install things like Parallels, and Windows XP (in order to swing my sword in that time-sink known as Oblivion.) As someone who can appreciate such things, I was also blown away by the performance of Rosetta, Apple’s compatibility layer that allows older applications not written for Intel’s processors to run seamlessly. This doesn’t meant the speed was equivalent; I was impressed that they could make these apps run at all. Indeed, Rosetta-run applications lag significantly behind their universal counterparts (and have a voracious appetite for RAM).

Photoshop was one of the worst offenders; even increasing my RAM to 1.5 gigabytes still only made it tolerable. Palettes routinely took several seconds to gain focus; zooming was far from instant; and sometimes, while swapping, the text tool was almost unusable. That’s why I (along with many, many others) was excited to see this beta version of CS3 become available. Would it make Photoshop snappy again?

In a word? Yes. But pictures (or in this case, screencasts) are worth a thousand words. I setup a highly, highly unscientific test: first, I would grab 50 pictures from a website I maintain . These pictures are all JPEGs, ranging in size from 4K to around 100K. Then I’d launch the Rosetta version of Photoshop CS1. I’d quit the program, then relaunch it by dragging these fifty pictures onto the Photoshop icon, and see how long it took. Then I’d do the same with the universal CS3 beta. (Why did I quit each program and then relaunch them? I didn’t want to have to worry about my RAM swapfile making this test take longer than it had to, for either program.)

Here are the movies.

Screencast 1: Photoshop CS1, Rosetta

Screencast 2: Photoshop CS3 beta, Universal

The verdict?
The beta manages this task in 18 seconds, while the CS1 takes 47. That’s a pretty healthy improvements. Kudos, Adobe.