'Real World' Photoshop Benchmark - Speed Test

Dont feel bad because this benchmark creates an image of about 500mb I believe so during operations it may need in excess of 2.5gigs of memory so if anyone has less than that, it will grind to a halt as it its your page file.

For example, if a dual G5 with 4 gig did the test in 1 minute and a G4 with 1.5 gigs did it in 10 minutes, I would be willing to bet that a G4 with 4 gigs of RAM would get it done in about 3 minutes.... This can be tested by modifying the action file to resize the image to one thats about 1/2 the size and see what the percentage speed increase is for teh machines that have a ton of ram and ones that have less than a ton of ram.

That is true, I'm really slowing myself down though by using the internal drive for the speed test. I'm running OSX, Photoshop's speed test, and then "virtual memory" all on one drive.

8min 30sec (all on internal hd)
Macbook Pro (with the damn whine!):
2.16ghz
1gb ram
100gb 7200rpm hd
Photoshop CS2

Pretty slow, but compared to my old 2ghz AMD pc, which took 16mins, it's pretty speedy.

I'll have to try connecting my external hd and see if it improves it much.

Let me go test me quad

What the?

It took my Quad 2:01.50

Thats with Quad 2.5 4gb 2X500gb SATA 7800gtx

Thats crap!

JRM PowerPod said:

What the?

It took my Quad 2:01.50

Thats with Quad 2.5 4gb 2X500gb SATA 7800gtx

Thats crap!

Click to expand...

7800gtx

Where did you get that card?

iMac G4 17": 1GHz, 768MB, 80GB HD (35GB free), nothing running but Photoshop CS: 10 min 15 sec

I'll try my PB in a bit.

PB G4 12": 1.33GHz, 1.25GB, 80GB HD (39GB free), nothing running but Photoshop CS: 7 min 1 sec

Speed tests on a 2.0 GHz MacBook with a variety of memory configurations (dual channel and single) plus Windows results on the same box.

Read about it here.

4:20 - MBP 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, 7200RPM 100GB Hard Drive, Photoshop CS, 20 History States
4:57 - PB G4 1.33GHz, 2GB RAM, 5400RPM 80GB Hard Drive, Photoshop CS, 20 History States
3:15 - MBP 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, 7200RPM 100GB Hard Drive, Photoshop CS, 1 History State.

The 7200 RPM drive really helped my MBP vs my old G4. I've been a bit underwhelmed by the MBP's speed, but everything I use for work is going through Rosetta, so it's not too surprising.

00:04:18:36 (Adobe CS1)

I posted my results over on macNN ( i forgot i had an account here! lol )

I ran it on my G5

Dual 2.7Ghz
6.5GB RAM
400GB Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 9650 256MB
No Scratch Disk
Photoshop CS2

Time: 51sec.

And on my Powerbook

17" 1.5Ghz G4
2GB RAM
80GB Hard Drive
ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 128MB
Photoshop CS2

Time: 3min 5sec

1 minute 15 seconds

did a restart
photoshop history state is 1
cpu set to highest performance
cache is 4
85% ram of 3gb

3 scratch disks

Dual 2.0 G5 Powermac
Ati X800Xt 256Mb Video card
74gb Raptor 10,000 rpm Boot drive

9:35 sec

iBook
1.07ghz
768gb ram
80gb 5,400rpm hd
Photoshop CS1

4mins 17seconds.

eMac 1.42GHz 1.5Gig Ram 70% to Photoshop CS history at 50 states.

mandis said:

00:04:18:36 (Adobe CS1)

Click to expand...

Is that 4 hours??? On a PowerBook?

Hmmm, think I did something wrong.


MacBook 2.0 GHZ
60 GB HD
1 GB RAM


Took me 11 mins, 12 seconds running CS1. Seems kinda slow.

yeah the other macbooks were in the 5-minute range.

what were your history states set at? and was your macbook hitting any page-outs?

this is great...

thanks for this easy test for my newly acquired tower. it was really cheap, and allowed me to graduate from my slower imac g5. but the test i took from cinebench, and others wasn't telling me much. at least i thought i had problems with my new pride. i use photoshop extensively for my living, and this test tested the speed of my computer in an often used program. how clever!! and my results are on par with other forum users.
powermac g5/ dp 1.8 ghz/ 3 gigram/ geforce5200-64mb/ new seagate 160gbsata platter 7200rpm/ and asd 17"/ and a plug to the wall... my time.......2 minutes and 18 seconds.

thanks for this forum, and the test.

edit: New results posted below

I decided to do this test on my iMac G5 rev. B (2GHz G5, 1.5 GB RAM, 160 GB HD - 10 gigs free, 10.4.6, PS CS2)

1) This is strange... I ran this test 4 times: first two after I downloaded it (with Safari taking ~ 80 MB of RAM) and 2 other times after restart.

So during the very 1st run I got 3:43
2nd time AND 3rd time I got 4:17 (it seemed to stall at guassuan blur, the CPU was idle, I assume it was writing to disk heavily). I restarted the computer before 3rd run.

2) This time I reduced history states from 200 to 1 (!). I did not restart the computer itself. So... time I got was impressing 2:03 , more than two times as fast as with 200 history states.

All four tests were performed after restarting Photoshop. If you're interested, I got 41751 pageout and 3.4 gigs were written to HD during 3rd test and after each run Photoshop was using 980-1000 MB RAM.

avg between two tests: 9mins 16 seconds

Powermac G4 Dual 500mhz "Gigabit Ethernet"
1 GB SDRAM
Tiger
CS 1

What was interesting to note is that the processors averaged around 80% load, and I did have iTunes running in the background playing podcasts, as well as iChat.

I think it's kind of funny/sad for all of you guys running Rosetta and getting results that are as slow as mine.

Dual Core 2.3 G5
2.5 Gigs of ram
250 gig drive
Tiger
256 mb's graphics

I got 2:19 (this is my uncles computer)

the DC 2.3GHz is capable of a much faster time than that. it should be right up there with my DP 2.7GHz

My old iMac took about 12 minutes, then it just stopped working. Let's see how the new one handles it.

1.8 Ghz iMac Core Duo with 1 gigabyte of RAM, using CS2...

6:00:92... nice. That's six minutes, by the way.

AGoglanian said:

the DC 2.3GHz is capable of a much faster time than that. it should be right up there with my DP 2.7GHz

Click to expand...

I'm going to try it again the next time I go to my uncle's office.