setting my photoshop settings: Image Cache, History, Memory Usage

[mrbojangles13]

hey guys i have cs3 on this machine http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=XW8200-XEON3200-2-R&cat=SYS
just wondering what i should adjust my settings to for best performance. this computer is used exclusively for photoshop and i do a little browsing on here with it too. everything else i do on my laptop. thanks in advance

[MaxxuM]

There is a good sticky above with tons of information for tweaking Windows systems...
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=236695

Photoshop's default memory/cache settings are typically good for average users.

[mrbojangles13]

that post is for xp i believe. i upgraded to vista 64 bit. will this stuff still work?

[MaxxuM]

that post is for xp i believe. i upgraded to vista 64 bit. will this stuff still work?

Vista is already pretty tweaked. The only real way to speed it up is to turn off UAC, Sidebar, eye candy (Aero) and perhaps a few Services. Keep it clean - thats the test way to keep it zippy.

Photoshop out of the box is also pretty good on settings. Unless you plan to really put it through the paces (in which case you would already know PS well enough to make those changes yourself), then you should just leave things alone. Upping your physical memory and using a swap/page drive will only give you marginal speed increase unless you do heavy batch processing.

[Bobster]

eye candy (Aero)
Actually Photoshop works faster with Aero on! i was having a hard time when i switched from XP64 to Vista64 with my brush strokes with my Wacom, i was trying everything to speed up the drawing of my stroke (had no trouble under XP64) and eventually found that it was the lack glass effect in Aero that was causing my headache, so i left it on and hey presto i had smooth, fast brush strokes once more!

[MaxxuM]

Actually Photoshop works faster with Aero on! i was having a hard time when i switched from XP64 to Vista64 with my brush strokes with my Wacom, i was trying everything to speed up the drawing of my stroke (had no trouble under XP64) and eventually found that it was the lack glass effect in Aero that was causing my headache, so i left it on and hey presto i had smooth, fast brush strokes once more!

Do you have an ATI graphics card? If so, for some odd reason ATI sometimes turns off 3D acceleration and reverts to 2D only when Aero is turned off (though OpenGL remains on) which slows things down significantly. Also, if you have a 1900 series ATI card you'll likely see errors in the event log saying that visual settings are set too high - that's because the graphics card is decelerating to 2D because it doesn't sense some 3D applications. You can change the per-application settings for 3D acceleration in the CCC Wizard/Settings so that it forces the graphics card to use 3D despite not detecting it itself. There are many games that require special attention with ATI graphics cards such as DDO.

If you have an NVidia card, then I'm not sure what the problem may be. Theoretically, it should not need Aero to perform 3D acceleration.

[Bobster]

If you have an NVidia card, then I'm not sure what the problem may be. Theoretically, it should not need Aero to perform 3D acceleration.
i was running a 7600GT, but i switched to an 8600GT the other week, not tried it since

[Moppie]

hey guys i have cs3 on this machine http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=XW8200-XEON3200-2-R&cat=SYS
just wondering what i should adjust my settings to for best performance. this computer is used exclusively for photoshop and i do a little browsing on here with it too. everything else i do on my laptop. thanks in advance



You have a dual Xeon system with 8GB of ram?
Then who cares how much you try and adjust settings in PS for best performance, you computer is already twice as fast as it really needs to be, and no amount of photoshop tweaking is going to make an over noticalbe difference. :cool::cool:

If you really wanted to improve performance for processing lots of large files at once, then you could turn some of that RAM into a virtual disc for CS3 to use as scratch.
Or, upgrade to CS4.

[mrbojangles13]

yeah my gf spoiled me for christmass.. im a lucky guy. yeah im kinda one of them over kill guys. how much of an improvement would turning some of my ram into a virtual disc for scratch make? thanks for all the advice.