Adobe with Intel
Nocens Angelus (35 pencils) | Thu, 2006-09-07 04:20I know it been talked about somewhere. but i was curious how adobe products weigh out with the intel chips, to my understanding it is the same speed if not slower than the g4 because adobe won't tune their products to the intel till cs3 right. Me who uses pretty 85% of all my work is with adobe basically is asking should i wait till cs3 comes out to buy the new powerbooks?
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Adobe is working on the new code and for the moment things work a little bit slower. For your every day work speedloss will not be noticeable. Only heavy duty work will take some more time.
The release of CS3 (probably May 2007) is important to know which specifications the new version will need. If you buy something now and the specs of CS3 are just a little bit higher for the best use of the soft you have bought something that won't live up to your expectations.
This week Adobe will release a preview of the possibilities of CS3 on the Photoshop World convention.
So I would advise on staying put until you know what the future will bring.
fidel
i bet that until may 2007 or anyway, next summer, apple will do some upgrades to the books. lets say intel core 2 duo? better match CS3 with those new machines
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always outnumbered, never outgunned
I recently looked at the iMac (not the latest ones with the 24" screen, but the ones just prior). In particular, the 17" Intel iMac with 512MB RAM installed. The 17" just happen to have Photoshop CS2 installed on it.
I gotta tell you, Photoshop didn't run that bad at all. And that's coming from someone who has a dual 2ghz G5 with 3gigs of RAM at home and comparing it to an iMac with only 512MB RAM. Yeah, it took about 15 seconds (my best guess) longer to start up than the G5 tower, but not so painful as some would have you believe.
I started by creating a 20x15 inch 300dpi document (70MB) and filling it with a color. Then I set a line of type and rasterized it. I then ran a gaussian blur on the type layer. It was nearly instant in rendering. I zoomed in and out rapidly and noticed no lag at all. I then ran a Render Clouds filter and ran a gaussian blur filter on the entire image. There was a slight lag in rendering, but only enough to take a sip of coffee before it finished. I saved the image which took what I would consider about the same amount of time as my G5 at home. I then quit Photoshop and double clicked the document on the desktop and it opened a bit faster this time, bringing up the document on screen rather smoothly.
Overall, given that this iMac was the slower of the two iMac models AND it had only 512MB of RAM plus I noticed at the end that iTunes was actually running in the background, I would say that the Intel Macs are perfectly capable of running Photoshop (and probably the rest of the Creative Suite) at more than acceptable speeds under Rosetta. So much so, that I'm now heavily favoring just getting a 24" iMac as my next machine rather than a MacPro. For the cost of the MacPro with 3gigs of RAM and an extra HD alone I can get the iMac with 3gigs of RAM and an upgraded video card for about the same price.
If you're a Web designer, blogger, casual surfer, photo enthusiast or only do light to moderate graphics, it is my opinion that you need not worry about Adobe's apps not being Universal Binary yet. Go ahead and buy the Intel Mac now. If you're a pro user, you're going to take a speed-hit, but it isn't a horrible hit, and you only have to wait until spring 2007 to get the CS3 suite.
Of course, using Safari, Mail, iPhoto, iMovie and other pre-installed Apple apps were smooth as silk and fast as hell.
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Visit The Graphic Mac for graphics and Mac OS tips, reviews, tutorials and discussion.
I don't know about that, Jim. For me, even a 2.16 GHz iMac with 2 GB of RAM feels slower than my G4 tower with 1 GB of RAM.
According to benchmarks the latest Core duo intels run Adobe apps as the latest G5's. So, no benefits to upgrade for Adobe apps, but everything else runs very fast.
Which benchmarks are these? These seem to suggest otherwise.
I can't comment on those benchmarks. What I can tell you is that I wrote that long post because it's what I experienced for myself. I never trust benchmarks, reviews or other "official" statements. I prefer to either speak to real users, or if possible just go find out for myself.
In my completely un-scientific tests, the results were as I stated above. There are a mountain of reasons that my experience with PS running under Rosetta were different than yours. They weren't the same machines, they didn't have the same software installed, etc...
I can also tell you that it's not like I sat there for hours working in Photoshop. These were "quick tests" that most certainly don't reflect a real-world working environment. It's possible that working in PS for hours on end would result in me shooting myself in the head.
But I was convinced enough at least to go with the iMac over the MacPro - and that was before Apple announced the speed-bumped iMacs with the 24" screen. Those machines are a little faster yet (and of course that 24" screen is sweeeeeet!
It's only my opinion, but I think the new iMacs are more than good enough for 75% or better of the designers out there. For the remaining high-end power users, yeah - waiting is a good thing.
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Visit The Graphic Mac for graphics and Mac OS tips, reviews, tutorials and discussion.
I recently purchased a Mac Pro and installed CS2 without any problems. I use a G5 at the office and don't really notice a huge difference, although I haven't used Photoshop heavily "yet". My only gripe is what happens to the decimals in InDesign. I hope they fix this soon.
Tip: Do not install Version Cue as it won't run an Intel machine and tends to bugger up some other features in the other apps.