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Author Topic: Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?  (Read 19309 times)

eleanorbrown

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« on: May 07, 2009, 03:45:48 pm »

I just upgraded my Mac from  8 gb RAM to 20 gb RAM but really need 64 bit Photoshop processing to take advantage of it as I can only specify up to 3 gb ram for Photoshop in the preferences.  Anyone have any ballpark idea when 64 bit will be available for the Mac.  Many thanks, Eleanor
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Doyle Yoder

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« Reply #1 on: May 07, 2009, 04:02:10 pm »

Quote from: eleanorbrown
I just upgraded my Mac from  8 gb RAM to 20 gb RAM but really need 64 bit Photoshop processing to take advantage of it as I can only specify up to 3 gb ram for Photoshop in the preferences.  Anyone have any ballpark idea when 64 bit will be available for the Mac.  Many thanks, Eleanor

I would not get my hopes up too high about any performance increase.

Check this out.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/1544954#1544954

Doyle

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Ben Rubinstein

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« Reply #2 on: May 07, 2009, 04:37:46 pm »

As CS5 is already in Alpha, assuming it does provide 64 bit for Mac, don't expect to get it without paying for the upgrade. Oh what a wailing and gnashing of teeth there will be!  
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ErikKaffehr

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #3 on: May 08, 2009, 12:31:40 am »

Hi,

From the writings from Apple it will be supported on CS5 and I guess that it about one year away. Apple has decided not to support the "Carbon API" that Apple uses on full 64-bits, so Adobe needs to make a full API switch to "Cocoa" involving dozens of million lines of code. It is a very major effort. My guess is that it is well possible that CS5 will have quite a few bugs.

On the other hand, the OS is already using all memory, essentially as an almost infinitely fast scratch disk, so going to full 64-bits at the application level may not give a perceivable benefit.

There are some good articles on the issue on Photoshop News but I found this short article on CNet which sums it up pretty well:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9909725-39.html

You may also check: http://macperformanceguide.com/ a site which contains a lot of information on getting the most from the Mac. The author of that site, Mr. Lloyd Chambers, has a lot of good writing on the more technical side of photography.

Best regards
Erik

Quote from: eleanorbrown
I just upgraded my Mac from  8 gb RAM to 20 gb RAM but really need 64 bit Photoshop processing to take advantage of it as I can only specify up to 3 gb ram for Photoshop in the preferences.  Anyone have any ballpark idea when 64 bit will be available for the Mac.  Many thanks, Eleanor
« Last Edit: May 08, 2009, 12:37:00 am by ErikKaffehr »
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eleanorbrown

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #4 on: May 08, 2009, 11:29:19 am »

Many thanks Eric.  this link will be very helpful.  I have a Mac pro 8 core/ 2 processor at 3ghz that came out in late 2006/early 2007 with RAM that is older slower ram, so I need to know what will best enhance this system.  Lots of good suggestions on these sites. Eleanor

Quote from: ErikKaffehr
Hi,

From the writings from Apple it will be supported on CS5 and I guess that it about one year away. Apple has decided not to support the "Carbon API" that Apple uses on full 64-bits, so Adobe needs to make a full API switch to "Cocoa" involving dozens of million lines of code. It is a very major effort. My guess is that it is well possible that CS5 will have quite a few bugs.

On the other hand, the OS is already using all memory, essentially as an almost infinitely fast scratch disk, so going to full 64-bits at the application level may not give a perceivable benefit.

There are some good articles on the issue on Photoshop News but I found this short article on CNet which sums it up pretty well:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9909725-39.html

You may also check: http://macperformanceguide.com/ a site which contains a lot of information on getting the most from the Mac. The author of that site, Mr. Lloyd Chambers, has a lot of good writing on the more technical side of photography.

Best regards
Erik
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Eleanor Brown
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Lab Magician

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #5 on: May 09, 2009, 10:14:11 am »

Hi Eleanor,

May I suggest a trick that you might find speeds up things and makes use of at least some of your extra RAM.

Create a RAM drive - a virtual disk image in the internal RAM - then assign it as the first scratch disk in Photoshop. Whilst not as good as directly addressed RAM, internal RAM drives are very fast, much faster than a hard drive.

You can create the RAM drive manually - this page shows how - Creating a RAM disk or you can use a utility such as Make RAM Disk.

Note:

There are some RAM drive size limitations depending on which version of OS X you're using (2GB in Tiger although I think this has been raised in Leopard).

You should be able to create more than one RAM drive, with different names, and assign them as additional PS scratch disks if you wish.  I'd suggest always having the final scratch as a hard drive just in case PS fills all the RAM drives.

Don't use too much RAM for RAM drives since if the OS is forced to swap active apps, such as PS, then it defeats the object.

RAM drives do not survive Power Down, Restart or being unmounted - all data is lost.  This isn't a problem for scratch data of course. This does mean that a new RAM drive has to be created after every power down etc.  I think the utility can be added to Start Up Items.

Finally, I haven't actually tried the manual method or utility above, however I have done this my own way using Terminal on Panther and with PS7.

HTH

Baz
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ajw

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #6 on: May 26, 2009, 01:36:25 pm »

Hi

Does anyone have any idea on what performance increase I might get from lightroom, if I move from 32 to 64bit without any increase in memory

Andy
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Wayne Fox

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #7 on: May 26, 2009, 04:51:16 pm »

Quote from: ajw
Hi

Does anyone have any idea on what performance increase I might get from lightroom, if I move from 32 to 64bit without any increase in memory

Andy

You didn't say how much RAM you have.  It's really a case of having to do both ... you really don't need 64bit if you don't have much RAM.  If you have lots of RAM then you need to use 64 bit so all of that RAM is available to system and applications.

So if you only have 2 or 3 gigs worth of RAM, I'm not sure you will see much improvement in LR at 64bit.  If you have 16gigs of RAM, you probably will see an improvement.  There really isn't a downside to using 64bit LR (at least for the Mac, don't know about windows), so you may as well use it.
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tived

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« Reply #8 on: May 28, 2009, 02:46:09 am »

Quote from: Wayne Fox
You didn't say how much RAM you have.  It's really a case of having to do both ... you really don't need 64bit if you don't have much RAM.  If you have lots of RAM then you need to use 64 bit so all of that RAM is available to system and applications.

So if you only have 2 or 3 gigs worth of RAM, I'm not sure you will see much improvement in LR at 64bit.  If you have 16gigs of RAM, you probably will see an improvement.  There really isn't a downside to using 64bit LR (at least for the Mac, don't know about windows), so you may as well use it.

Wayne,

64bit on windows is just fine, just add as much ram as you can :-) both vista and xp in their 64bit versions are excellent

Henrik
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Tyler Mallory

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« Reply #9 on: June 05, 2009, 12:34:02 pm »

There are also a couple of plugins that, for some reason, are not enabled or installed by default. The "Use Bigger Tiles" for example, causes Photoshop to process numbers in bigger chunks. It enabled a surprising leap in performance on my 2008 Mac 8-core. Lloyd Chambers has an excellent article about some of these and some general optimization ideas on his site: http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingP...figuration.html

Doyle Yoder

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« Reply #10 on: July 02, 2009, 06:15:12 am »

This does not look good. Apparently PSCS5 will not be a true 64-bit app.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2079668#2079668

Doyle
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BernardLanguillier

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« Reply #11 on: July 02, 2009, 08:20:10 pm »

Quote from: DYP
This does not look good. Apparently PSCS5 will not be a true 64-bit app.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2079668#2079668

The thread you mention isn't very clear on that.

I really hope that you are wrong, but if you are right this will be the worst news for me this year.

Not upgrading to CS5 will of course be the obvious thing to do (still cannot figure out why I upgraded to CS4), but it will lead me to re-consider seriously my reliance on Adobe products and Apple. I believe that I will not be alone as the usage of stitching spreads at the speed of light together with higher resolution devices, 32 bits really looks like 20th century technology.

Cheers,
Bernard

Doyle Yoder

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« Reply #12 on: July 02, 2009, 08:54:52 pm »

Quote from: BernardLanguillier
The thread you mention isn't very clear on that.

I really hope that you are wrong, but if you are right this will be the worst news for me this year.

Not upgrading to CS5 will of course be the obvious thing to do (still cannot figure out why I upgraded to CS4), but it will lead me to re-consider seriously my reliance on Adobe products and Apple. I believe that I will not be alone as the usage of stitching spreads at the speed of light together with higher resolution devices, 32 bits really looks like 20th century technology.

Cheers,
Bernard

And another comment from Chris Cox.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2079668#2079668

Not look good at all.

Doyle
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francois

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #13 on: July 03, 2009, 05:52:52 am »

Quote from: DYP
And another comment from Chris Cox.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2079668#2079668

Not look good at all.

Doyle
Just to clarify the situation about 64-bit applications on Mac OS X (10.5 & 10.6):

• GUI applications must use Cocoa for 64-bit support.
• Carbon GUI APIs are (and will be) restricted to 32-bit. Apple decided at the last moment that Carbon GUI APIs would not support 64-bit.
• Using the GUI Cocoa 64-bit APIs is not enough to make your application 64-bit compatible. There's additional work to be done. For those interested, Apple has a very detailed guide.

I don't see why Photoshop CS5 can't be a 64-bit application. I've read the above mentionned discussion threads and saw nothing that indicates that PS CS5 won't run as a 64-bit app.

As for plugins, this is a different story!
« Last Edit: July 03, 2009, 06:06:40 am by francois »
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Francois

Jack Flesher

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Photoshop 64 bit for Mac, When?
« Reply #14 on: July 03, 2009, 09:31:38 am »

Quote from: Lab Magician
Hi Eleanor,

May I suggest a trick that you might find speeds up things and makes use of at least some of your extra RAM.

Create a RAM drive - a virtual disk image in the internal RAM - then assign it as the first scratch disk in Photoshop. Whilst not as good as directly addressed RAM, internal RAM drives are very fast, much faster than a hard drive.

Baz,

Lloyd and I tested RAM disks pretty extensively on both our machines (we have lot's of RAM) and they did not work as well as our dedicated RAID-0 scratch partitions.   The largest RAM drive you can make is 2G, so we set up 4 of them and set them as primary scratch -- frankly not much improvement over a dedicated single scratch disk.  Note that CS scratch will sometimes go as large as 10x to 20x your base file size, especially when the "Disable Scratch Compression" plug in is active (which definitely speeds up scratch performance BTW), so if you are working on very large files, you can run up a temporary scratch file of 30 or 40 Gigs on a single large image.    Lastly, RAM disks don't stick on a re-boot, so you have to recreate them each time you boot -- not a huge deal as you can write a script, but nonetheless, more hassle than they're worth.

FWIW,
« Last Edit: July 03, 2009, 09:34:12 am by Jack Flesher »
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joergen geerds

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« Reply #15 on: July 11, 2009, 10:41:05 am »

Quote from: Lab Magician
May I suggest a trick that you might find speeds up things and makes use of at least some of your extra RAM.

Create a RAM drive - a virtual disk image in the internal RAM - then assign it as the first scratch disk in Photoshop. Whilst not as good as directly addressed RAM, internal RAM drives are very fast, much faster than a hard drive.

RAM disks don't help at all, they are cumbersome to set-up, and are also real RAM hogs, due to some OSX inefficiencies (a 2GB RAM disk needs 2GB RAM, +2 GB RAM cache/buffer, + overhead), which makes them useless (see barefeats.com and macperformanceguide.com). plus, each RAM disk can only hold 2.2GB max, and PS doesn't have cascading scratch disk levels, which means it will just fill it up (fast) and then go to disk anyway, especially when your project generates 20-100GB scratch data anyway.

Much more helpful are 2 photoshop plugins that come with the extras folder on your CS4 CD: bigger tiles and forceVMbuffering.
forceVMbuffering is using the RAM >3GB as a RAM buffer before writing the scratch data to your scratch disk.
I have 18GB of RAM in my machine, and when I open a medium sized project (say a 2.5GB layered PSB file), and work on it, PS rarely touches the scratch disk, and keeps almost all in RAM. this is in my opinion a very simple work around (together with a fast scratch disk RAID) until we see a true 64bit PS on the mac. (you can see how much RAM PS is actually using in the activity monitor). also, set your PS RAM settings to something like 70-80%, and not 100% since some PS routines will not work properly when they don't get some free headroom (i.e. layer blending). another way to optimize your performance is to limit the undo-steps to 4-6 steps, which is usually enough for people who have a rough idea what they are doing.

Wayne Fox

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« Reply #16 on: July 14, 2009, 03:42:41 pm »

I have been following with interest Joseph Holmes efforts at using a series of solid state drives  set up as a Raid 0 which are designed to fit in the 2nd optical drive slot.  The idea is intriguing.  I'm not sure if he has formulated any conclusions as to how much benefit he sees in photoshop (if any).

If your interested, here's the link.

http://www.josephholmes.com/news-fastphotoshop.html
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francois

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« Reply #17 on: July 15, 2009, 05:49:43 am »

Quote from: Wayne Fox
I have been following with interest Joseph Holmes efforts at using a series of solid state drives  set up as a Raid 0 which are designed to fit in the 2nd optical drive slot.  The idea is intriguing.  I'm not sure if he has formulated any conclusions as to how much benefit he sees in photoshop (if any).

If your interested, here's the link.

http://www.josephholmes.com/news-fastphotoshop.html
Thanks for sharing! I missed this very interesting article.
« Last Edit: July 15, 2009, 05:50:11 am by francois »
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joergen geerds

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« Reply #18 on: July 16, 2009, 12:02:40 pm »

Quote from: Wayne Fox
I have been following with interest Joseph Holmes efforts at using a series of solid state drives  set up as a Raid 0 which are designed to fit in the 2nd optical drive slot.  The idea is intriguing.  I'm not sure if he has formulated any conclusions as to how much benefit he sees in photoshop (if any).

If your interested, here's the link.

http://www.josephholmes.com/news-fastphotoshop.html

I was contemplating that option also: http://www.startech.com/item/SATABAY425BK-...or-525-Bay.aspx

wether you use laptop drives, or solid-state drives, it still requires an additional SATA RAID card. While it may be faster than a 2-3 3.5in RAID setup, it certainly costs more, and in the long run more RAM still wins.

I didn't go the solid state disk route earlier this year because even the fastest drives still suffer from the "reusing a data block will take a long time" syndrome (SD writes insanely fast, but internally it doesn't overwrite a block of data, it just uses an unused block of data... over time, all the unused blocks are used up, and you will get crazy slow writes, because the SD needs to "reformat" used blocks, and that can take up to 0.5s each.) basically, if you have a virgin SD RAID, you can use them as PS scratch until they are fully used, and then they are done (kinda for single use only). as far as I know, there is no tool on the Mac to refurbish the SDs back to their original state yet, only windows. I would say that until SDs don't show that behavior/technology, old-school disks might be the way to go.

Christopher

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« Reply #19 on: July 17, 2009, 04:33:25 pm »

Quote from: joergen geerds
I was contemplating that option also: http://www.startech.com/item/SATABAY425BK-...or-525-Bay.aspx

wether you use laptop drives, or solid-state drives, it still requires an additional SATA RAID card. While it may be faster than a 2-3 3.5in RAID setup, it certainly costs more, and in the long run more RAM still wins.

I didn't go the solid state disk route earlier this year because even the fastest drives still suffer from the "reusing a data block will take a long time" syndrome (SD writes insanely fast, but internally it doesn't overwrite a block of data, it just uses an unused block of data... over time, all the unused blocks are used up, and you will get crazy slow writes, because the SD needs to "reformat" used blocks, and that can take up to 0.5s each.) basically, if you have a virgin SD RAID, you can use them as PS scratch until they are fully used, and then they are done (kinda for single use only). as far as I know, there is no tool on the Mac to refurbish the SDs back to their original state yet, only windows. I would say that until SDs don't show that behavior/technology, old-school disks might be the way to go.

As seen in many test this was the case from earlier or cheaper SSDs. For exampe the Intel X25 series doesn't really suffer from the problem you are describing. In addition, more RAM is certainly good but not better. However, you will only really know what I mean after working on a SSDs raid 0 System.
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