Performance CS2: added video memory–but not performance

SS
Posted By
Stan_Schwartz
Sep 10, 2006
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401
Replies
6
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After reading lots of FAQs and older posts, as well as Adobe’s "white paper," I decided that some of the slow performance of CS2 on my machine may have been inadequate video memory. Smart Sharpen redraws and some filters, especially Polaroid’s Dust and Scratch plug-in, ran slowly.

Smart Sharpen with my old card seemed to run better with Hardware Acceleration as per the Adobe’s informatioin.

Machine: Dell 3.05gHz CPU with HT, 1 gig RAM scratch on second internal hard drive, WinXP Pro Old card: ATI with 32MB RAM
New card: ATI Radeon with 256 MB DDR memory.
Preferences: now at 55% Photoshop RAM and Image Cache =4

Smart Sharpen still runs very slowly, especially if sharpening at 16-bits (which I guess is a waste of effort if sending to an inkjet printer), although other filters, like the Polaroid, run somewhat faster.

Is there anything else, other than adjusting Preference settings,that needs to be done to assure that PS uses all the newly available video memory?

Thanks. I’ve read everything I could find in the forums, FAQs, and the Knowledgebase papers on optimizing performance in Windows.

Stan Schwartz
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C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 10, 2006
Video RAM will only (marginally) improve redraw times, not overall performance.

You’ve only got 1GB of on-board RAM which is quite adequate, but it doesn’t make the machine a flyer.

I’d add more RAM. Good quality RAM 2GB is good and if you’re running XP Pro you could go up to 3GB with the 3GB switch (This doesn’t work on all machines. Be sure to read Microsoft’s warnings on the matter)

The 55% allocated to PS is probably too much with only 1GB RAM. Try dropping it to see if things improve.

Make sure that Scratch disk has about 20GB of free defragmented space available and that it isn’t being written to (saving work in progress files, for instance) at the same time PS is using it as a scratch disk.

Make sure too that you have at least 20% free space on drive C to cope with the dynamic nature of the various TEMP files and the system’s Paging File (virtual memory).

Lots of little tweeks could probably see a significant gain in overall performance.

Hope this helps.

Chris.
SS
Stan_Schwartz
Sep 11, 2006
Chris,

Thanks. I don’t have that much free space on the scratch drive.

Given that the largest image I ever process is a 35mm transparency scanned at my film scanner’s high-bit, which amounts to around 100MB, I am not clear why 20 GB. The highest I ever see on the status bar is around 750 MB.

Time to go buy more RAM, I think…

Stan
C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 11, 2006
As you process an image Photoshop holds all that information in Scratch. Each layer and each history step and the tiling data for building the screen preview can all add up to a considerable size giving you a huge temporary file compared to your actual file size. The more History states you have, the bigger it gets.

When you consider that (in simplistic terms) Photoshop uses Scratch as its memory and the RAM as a cache for that memory, you can see just how important it is to maintain a healthy Scratch Disk.

It should be defragmented, and located on a physical drive other than that used by the OS for its paging file.

No drive should ever be allowed to become more than 80% full. Defragging a full drive is a nightmare.

Yes more RAM will help. But do give consideration to that scratch disk. 20GB might seem like overkill. But what if you need to have more than one file open at a time?
C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 11, 2006
Just a thought. If disk space is a problem, make sure you not got any orphaned TEMP files littered around the place. They can by HUGE. Do a system-wide search for .tmp and delete them.
H
Ho
Sep 11, 2006
Given that the largest image I ever process is a 35mm transparency scanned at my film scanner’s high-bit, which amounts to around 100MB,

I’m working with an 8bit 35mm scan right now with about 40 layers. It’s using ~3G of my 40G Scratch partition. I have another partition allocated for an additional Sctatch volume should 40G ever be too small. On occasion, it is.
SS
Stan_Schwartz
Sep 12, 2006
I found around a couple GB of temp files which I will remove.

Thanks for the information about the scratch file sizes. I rarely get over 5 or 6 layers, but I will make more scratch file room.

All much appreciated.

Stan

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