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Mac mini and Adobe Creative Suite CS6 performance?
- Thread starter hemmick reef
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I have a mid 2011 Mini and CS5 creative suite (so I can't speak about CS6 but I think they are similar in requirements) and everything runs perfectly, no lag or anything...
OpenCL should theoretically work with the 2012 version, which is nice. The 2011 with the HD3000 doesn't have it. The HD 4000 supports OpenCL 1.1. Do not waste money on the current discrete card option. Creative Suite has specific vram requirements. Right now 256MB is the minimum, and certain gpu functions aren't supported at that. You can technically go with OpenGL off even in CS6, but I see the discrete graphics option as a downgrade because of the spec conflict there. I'd either go base mini or server. Ivy Bridge + base mini wouldn't be a bad option. If it's too slow, you'd have to go to the server mini to see a noticeable improvement due to the presence of quad core cpus. In either case, make sure you have enough ram. It's the cheapest upgrade by far. At current prices you can max it without spending very much. Even 16GB is down to $80-90.
Apple will most likely remedy that at some point. The hardware should support OpenCL 1.1. Even then, the discrete version is worthless as they don't ship it with enough vram to use OpenCL within Creative Suite anyway, and it may not work for gpu acceleration of any kind by CS7 given what I mentioned.
I'm currently testing Photoshop CS6 on a 2.7 i7 mini with AMD graphics and 16Gb RAM. I'm seeing lots of screen lagging (27" Eizo CG275W monitor). I'm hoping that Adobe and Apple updates will improve things. At the moment I don't think you can bank on any Mac Mini running Adobe Creative Suite smoothly.
This may seem strange but I have just returned a new iMac because of poor performance:
2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
2560 x 1440 resolution
8GB memory
1TB hard drive1
AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 512MB
The reason I asked about the Mini is that I have read elsewhere that users have had no real issues, so if a Mac mini works why did I have so much screen lag using Illustrator CS6 on an iMac. My four year old PC runs CS3 like a dream.
I run the CS6 Design edition on a 2.5GHz i5 Mini with Radeon HD 6630M, 16GB RAM, aftermarket 512GB SSD in 1920x1200. It has almost zero lag in Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. When I used to access photos (I do work with some +20Mpix stuff) from the external storage on a gigabit network it lagged a bit more, however once I've switched the workflow to copy stuff to the SSD, work from there and copy back to the storage, it's lighting fast.
However, this computer has only OS X and CS6 installed and the 16GB upgrade is not officially supported by Apple if things go awry.
However, this computer has only OS X and CS6 installed and the 16GB upgrade is not officially supported by Apple if things go awry.
Illustrator CS6 specifies minimum 2 gbs, recommended 8 gbs of RAM. Will it run better with 16 gbs?
Interesting, my set up is similar to yours but I find Photoshop slow. I think my problems might be related to driving a 27" 2560 x 1440 screen.
Here's an example. If I open a single 12mp raw image in Adobe Camera Raw, make a few adjustments (noise reduction, lens correction, a few edits with the adjustment brush) and then return to the Basic panel, dragging the Temperature slider from left to right takes about 5 seconds for the image preview to update. That is anything but snappy.
That's using ACR in full screen mode. If I make the window smaller (e.g 1900 x 1200), performance is quicker, though still not fast.
One of the very few things I did setting up the CS6 was I maxed out the RAM usage per application in respective preferences and also set SSD as the scratch disk. I believe the 16 GB RAM upgrade has a huge impact on CS6's performance, however can not back up this claims with a proper scientific test. I would love to get ahold of a current iMac, put all the RAM it can technically handle, set up a 8 GB ramdisk and use it as the scratch drive. This should be faster in i/o by a factor of magnitude than my Mini.