'Real World' Photoshop Benchmark - Speed Test

4 minutes even, running only finder, dashboard, and an UB stopwatch program. Might have made it in less had I not been worried so much and kept switching to CS2 to see if there were dialog boxes I wasn't seeing in the grayed out background view.

System:
MacBook Pro 2.16ghz Intel Core Duo 15.4"
ATI 256mb graphics card
2GB RAM (apple)
100GB HD (I think the 5400)
no scratch disk, unfortunately CS2 did not recognize my FW external earlier today and i'm no longer next to it

Photoshop CS2 (tryout) Running via Rosetta
OS X 10.4.6
99% memory available to CS2, 1 history state i think it is.

I got my iMac yesterday, so I decided to try this test. It's a stock 2.0 GHz 20" iMac Core Duo with 512 MB RAM. I got 9:28 with nothing other than Photoshop, Dashboard, Finder and Quicksilver running. I have a feeling the gig of RAM that will be here next week will help quite a bit. Even before I started running the actions in the test, I could see from Activity Monitor that the computer was swapping pretty heavily and there was no free RAM.

6:31.6

PowerBook G4
1.67Ghz
1.5 gb ram
100gb 5400rpm
ATI 9700 128mb
Super Drive Single Layer
Display 1280x854
10.4.6
Photoshop CS2

Flyinace2000 said:

6:31.6

PowerBook G4
1.67Ghz
1.5 gb ram
100gb 5400rpm
ATI 9700 128mb
Super Drive Single Layer
Display 1280x854
10.4.6
Photoshop CS2

Click to expand...

I think people should state number of history states in PS rather than type of optical drive Am I right?

So I ran this today on my 15" 1.67GHz Powerbook with the following specs:
1.67 GHz CPU
1.5 GB RAM
80 GB Hitachi
ATI Radeon 9700 64 MB
OS X 10.4.6

My time was 7:55, with only PS CS2, Textedit, and 3 Dashboard widgets running. CS2 had access to basically all the resources I have. It was reasonably snappy™ until it got to the Gaussian blur....ouch.

Thanks for the test, and the motivation for a fast desktop

eXan said:

I think people should state number of history states in PS rather than type of optical drive Am I right?

Click to expand...

I was staitng the optical drive to help specify the generation of my powerbook.

how is my powerbook able to beat the 1.67s? does the extra .5gb of ram really help that much?

"And on my Powerbook

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

Time: 3min 5sec"

what history states were you guys running? that was with it set to 10 on mine.

AGoglanian said:

how is my powerbook able to beat the 1.67s? does the extra .5gb of ram really help that much?

"And on my Powerbook

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

Time: 3min 5sec"

what history states were you guys running? that was with it set to 10 on mine.

Click to expand...

Easy. This test is retarded. The times are all over the board for like machines. I can't believe this lame test has this many posts in it. The test with the horse image and the radial blur was dead on accurate. This test needs to die.

So I ran this test on my Dual 1.8 G5 2gb RAM and had a variety of results, from 3 minutes to almost 7! (usually running about 6, completely inconsistent)

I tried repairing permissions for kicks, and it quite a bit of red! Couldnt repair either..I think I am going to flush out the hard drive and do an OS reinstall and see what happens.

EDIT:
I reinstalled OSX tiger, updated it, reinstalled Adobe, reran the tests:
First run: 4:18
Run 2/Run3: 2:30

The Little Mac that Could

Well apart from the stupid bickering regarding the test, cannot people just get the idea that it is a relative test and not one about workflows, who's better equiped for the "industry" blah, blah, blah. If you don't like the "FREE" test build your own....now back to post here's a set of results from downunder.

Machine: Rev A single G5 1.8, 1.5 GB RAM, Stock Seagate 7200 rpm 160GB HD, additional HD same spec (different SN series), FX5200 GPU. All sorts of USB devices hanging of it, Airport Switched ON and some utility apps running like MenuMeters Uptime 23 hrs, Apps running Dashboard, Safari, Mail, iChat, Address book, iCal, Acrobat Pro 7, Illustrator CS1, Text Edit, Photo shop CS1 - cannot get much more real world than that except I usually have MORE running. Nearly forgot OSX 10.4.6 with all updates in place

Using Boot drive as scratch 4:40 - History State 20
Using HD2 as scratch 3.33 - History State 20
Using HD2 as scratch 2:10 - History State 1

On my newly-acquired MDD
Dual 1.25 Ghz G4
1 gig of ram
80 gig drive (ran test on this drive containing Tiger)
Photoshop CS
Tiger

I got 5:23, better than my iMac G5 by about 30 seconds.

7min 20sec

macbook 2.0ghz / 1,2 GB RAM / CS2 (rosetta)

4 minutes & 6 seconds

20" iMac
2.0 CPU
240 GB Hard Drive
2 GB RAM
256 MB Raedon(I forget exactly what X1600, maybe?)
Photoshop CS2

I retested on my MDD and was impressed by the 2nd go. This time I set it to 1 history state and had 75 percent of my ram (600 mb's) allocated to Photoshop.
3:38

Dual 1.25 G4
1 gig of ram
80 gig drive, contains my OS as well
Panther
Photoshop CS

FF_productions said:

I retested on my MDD and was impressed by the 2nd go. This time I set it to 1 history state and had 75 percent of my ram (600 mb's) allocated to Photoshop.
3:38

Dual 1.25 G4
1 gig of ram
80 gig drive, contains my OS as well
Panther
Photoshop CS

Click to expand...

Strange... sounds slow for dual 1.25 G4

My iMac got 2:03 with one history state

eXan said:

Strange... sounds slow for dual 1.25 G4

My iMac got 2:03 with one history state

Click to expand...

My 2nd hard drive is coming in tommorow so I'll retest again, I'm also going to purchase another gig of ram. I though 3:30 would be pretty good...

2:19

dual g5 1.8, 4gb ram, 300gb 16mb sata, ati 9800 256mb.

cool test! had folding running in the background... mabey turn it off and try again

3:52 seconds.

Dual 2.0 G5 PM, 2.5 gigs o' RAM.

I could get a lower time easily - I had Safari, Adium open when I ran the test, because that's what I normally have open when I work. My history states are at 300, I could lower them.

However, I'm very interested in adding a second drive for a scratch disk.

How would I set this up?

Mike Teezie said:

3:52 seconds.

Dual 2.0 G5 PM, 2.5 gigs o' RAM.

I could get a lower time easily - I had Safari, Adium open when I ran the test, because that's what I normally have open when I work. My history states are at 300, I could lower them.

However, I'm very interested in adding a second drive for a scratch disk.

How would I set this up?

Click to expand...

Lower your history state to something around 1-20 and your time will significantly improve. All you need to do is look for SATA drives that you can stick in your G5. I'd look around http://www.newegg.com for some SATA drives if you want another one in there.

Reason I'm saying newegg is because I just got a hard drive off their website and it works just fine and it was pretty cheap too.

I understand how to put in another hard drive, I'm just saying I never knew you could set up scratch disks in any other way than how Adobe did.

I'll look around and see what I can come up with.

PC vs. Mac

PC...

13 minutes and 04 seconds!!!

AMD 64bit 3000+ (2.1GHZ)
1GB DDR 2
250GB Hard Drive (internal at 7200RPM)
128MB of Graphics Memory
(Windows XP Pro, fresh restart, Photoshop CS2)

Mac...

9 minutes and 55 seconds!!!

MacBook Pro
Intel Core Duo (2.16GHZ x2)
1GB DDR
100GB Hard Drive (internal at 5400RPM)
256MB of Graphics Memory
(Mac OS X (10.4.7), fresh restart, Photoshop CS2 - in Rosetta)


So offically, Intel Mac is better than the average PC even under Rosetta

eddx said:

PC...

13 minutes and 04 seconds!!!

AMD 64bit 3000+ (2.1GHZ)
1GB DDR 2
250GB Hard Drive (internal at 7200RPM)
128MB of Graphics Memory
(Windows XP Pro, fresh restart, Photoshop CS2)

Mac...

9 minutes and 55 seconds!!!

MacBook Pro
Intel Core Duo (2.16GHZ x2)
1GB DDR
100GB Hard Drive (internal at 5400RPM)
256MB of Graphics Memory
(Mac OS X (10.4.7), fresh restart, Photoshop CS2 - in Rosetta)


So offically, Intel Mac is better than the average PC even under Rosetta

Click to expand...

This doesnt sound right. Care to give number of history states on both machines?

Ok...prize for the first to test a 2.6ghz MacPro!

Intel Mac mini, Core Duo, 1.66 GHz, 2 GB RAM, stock HD. System drive as scratch disk. Installed all updates for system. CS2 demo version with all updates installed. Left history states and stuff on default.

Time: 6:01

Is that good or bad? Got killed on the Gaussian blur ... I could see the computer struggle to change the progress bar.