Kevin Airgid is an internationally recognized designer, author and speaker. He runs a small interactive studio that develops creative projects for clients such as: Amnesty, ESPN, Ford, MTV and Pepsi.
Photoshop CS3 runs faster on a Mac Pro
I recently made the switch back to Mac. My last Mac was a 1600 (aka the Pizza Box) running OS 9. I am now working in a mix environment. I still use my "old" PC for 3D Studio Max, but my primary development platform is Mac OS X Leopard, on a shinny Mac Pro. A few things I have notice in the 2 weeks I have been working with OS X is the fact that Photoshop seems much more snappy. Even though this machine has only 2 GIG of RAM (compared to the the 4 GIG on my XP machine) all the things I do in Photoshop seem faster. The system as a whole seems more responsive. When I try to do several things really fast OS X never seems to try to catch up to me. Often on Windows XP the system would slow down as it tried to process several things at once. Another big difference is just how fast Photoshop launches. I swear it takes 1/2 the time on Mac compared to the PC. Now keep in mind these are exactly the same copies of Photoshop (CS3 Extended).
If anyone knows of any benchmark tests comparing equal Mac hardware against PC hardware I would love to see them. So far I have yet to find a shoot out online that compares apples to oranges (no pun intended!)
3 Responses
Thank you for your feedback. The machine I was comparing it to was pretty well matched actually. Here is the specs.
Old Machine
Dell XPS
Quad Core 2.6 GHZ
4 GIG o-RAM
Intel Board (I think)
Similar Video Card to my Mac
Only big difference is the fact that the Mac has an extra 4 CPU’s… which really doesn’t do much for most of Photoshop, except a few filters that might be able to access the other CPU’s.
But over all it’s much snappier on my Mac. I will do a test for you, I’ll install Vista on bootcamp with the exact same machine, and then run Pshop in it just for giggles… I’ll post here if I get time.
Just an update, I installed Vista 64 Bit using Bootcamp. It’s hard to tell since I don’t have Photoshop for the PC anymore, but 3D Studio Max 2009 runs like a dream with 10 gig of ram!
RAM memory is not the only thing that affects speed and performance. and I AM SURE that your PC doesn’t have equivalent components as the mac… try with a pc using a nice server board, two intel core 2 quad cpus, SATA 3 hard drives, 2 x 512MB geforce 8xxx graphics card, and only 2GB of RAM and we’ll see wich one is faster. ’cause as i see it, you just have a crappy pc with 4 GB of ram.