Adobe announced today all the new features of Creative Suite 5 and that they are taking pre-orders. The actual product is expected to ship mid-May and I for one cannot wait!
With the re-write of Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the bunch into cocoa, 64-bit support is now coming to the Mac platform. What does that mean? Simply that on top of all the great features, such as content-aware fill and puppet warp in Photoshop, there should be no more bottleneck in our memory benchmark tests! Adobe CS4 and prior were limited to a maximum of 3GB of memory usage – which was great back when 2GB was the maximum amount of memory that a particular Mac could be upgraded to. But once that barrier was broken and you could install more memory in any given system, our real-world benchmark testing admittedly fell behind a bit.
Sure, theoretical tests still showed the benefit of having more memory in any given computer – but theory is only nice if you can put it to a practical use. The straight Photoshop Action test that has been the standard of our real world testing, in and of itself, couldn’t access more than 3GB of memory at a time; once it got going at full speed, it could go no faster. Of course, we added additional tests to address more of a real-world atmosphere by using additional programs to emulate additional workflow to your machine. Running the test with iTunes or a “RAM Hog” program really exemplifies some hardcore usage. Additional memory always helps when multitasking.
Now that the latest Mac Pro machines can address as much as 64GB of memory, its nice to see that the major applications will be able to capitalize on all the resources available to them. Stay tuned to our blog, so to speak, to find what CS5 and your Mac is truly capable of.
Nothing theoretical about more memory and CS4.
http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshop-TestResults.html