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Adobe Photoshop CS3

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is here, Universal Binary and all. Ars goes in-depth with …

Speed, stability, and benchmarking

Overall, Photoshop CS3 is as stable or more so than it was in the past, in my experience. This is quite a feat considering the amount of legacy code that had to make it to Xcode for Intel Mac compatibility. I'd say in the last week, it may have crashed twice between my MacBook Pro or Quad Xeon at work. I was partly prepared for a crash every few days considering its being ported and fortunately, even during the public beta, we haven't had to sacrifice stability or speed to get Photoshop on Intel Macs. But the proof is in the PSBench.

PSBench Advanced

All machines set to 55 percent RAM, 1 history state. Times are in seconds.

  Photoshop CS2 (Power Mac G5) Photoshop CS3 (Power Mac G5) Photoshop CS3 (MacBook Pro, Mac OS X) Photoshop CS3 (MacBook Pro, Windows XP)
Rotate 90 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3
Rotate 9 1.3 1.4 1.1 1.2
Rotate 0.9 1.1 1.3 1.0 1.1
1px Gaussian blur 0.3 0.3 0.5 0.7
3.7px Gaussian blur 1.3 1.1 0.7 0.6
85px Gaussian blur 1.6 1.6 1.3 1.4
50%, 1px, 0 level unsharp mask 0.5 0.5 0.7 0.6
50%, 3.7px, 0 level unsharp mask 1.2 1.3 0.9 1.0
50%, 10px, 5 level unsharp mask 1.5 1.6 1.1 1.1
Despeckle 0.4 0.5 1.3 1.2
RGB to CMYK 1.8 1.8 2.2 2.2
Reduce 60% 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.7
Lens flare 2.7 2.9 3.4 3.1
Color halftone 9.6 10.7 6.6 8.1
NTSC color 2.0 2.8 2.2 2.2
Accented edges 9.2 9.3 7.4 12.0
Pointillize 20.2 8.7 6.6 7.8
Watercolor 20.8 21.3 18.3 25.6
Polar coordinates 1.5 1.7 2.6 3.2
Radial blur 19.6 20.1 10.7 10.1
Lighting effects 1.5 1.4 2.7 1.3
Total 98.8 91.0 72.1 83.5

No surprises from the G5 results between CS2 and CS3, with the exception of the Pointillize feature, which must have been buggy in CS2 (9.0.2) since the time is so bad compared to all the other versions. The Despeckle is faster on the almost four-year-old, first-gen G5, probably due to some Altivec optimizations that couldn't make it into the Intel version. That's more than made up by the Radial Blur filter on the Intel MacBook Pro, which completes in half the time. 

I wasn't prepared for the MacBook Pro to be faster on the Mac OS X side, considering that Photoshop has been on x86 Windows for a long time now and this is the first we're seeing of Photoshop on Intel Macs.

I was also thinking that the Windows side would be a bit faster since brush performance is still a bit better in Windows on the same machine (this has always been the case). I checked all my background processes before starting and the Windows install is very fresh so I know it's a level test ground. Either way, it's nice to see that right from the start Photoshop on the Intel Macs is no slouch.

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