Digital Home Thoughts: Photoshop CS4 Performance Examined

"If you've ever used Photoshop, and watched the little progress bar crawl across the screen when you apply a filter, you've no doubt wished for better performance. Performance in photo editing applications has become a little more complicated, partly because there are more photo editing apps out today, but also because the graphics chip companies are in the game, accelerating portions of current generation photo editing software."

Not being a hard core photo editor, I've never really found myself waiting while doing anything in Photoshop. Of course, simple crops, red-eye removal and copying and pasting images together is most of what I've done. I have to admit that upon hearing that Photoshop CS4 utilizes your GPU, I had to wonder just how useful it would be. So I'm naive and ignorant. ExtremeTech took four computers with various hardware, though all fairly powerful, to see what difference the GPU integration makes. The results are quite enlightening and definately make the case for those who edit a lot of high resolution photos to trick out their rig and upgrade to CS4. It's beyond my means or needs, but perhaps some of you could be tempted!