CS4: Not Really Fully Optimized for Multicore Macs Yet

Lloyd, well-known computer expert and photographer, made interesting (not to say disappointing) findings about Photoshop CS4. While the future is to benefit from the raw power computing standing unused in GPU, Lloyd discovered that when enabling Open GL drawing in CS4, supposed to speed rendering, it was actually slowing it down! So despite Adobe claiming that Open GL is faster and that users would benefit from it, Lloyd had to disable Open GL rendering option to get redraw performance level in his workflow at a similar level to the one experienced with the CS3.
But that’s not all, Lloyd noticed that despite all claims from Adobe arguing of CS4 ready to benefit from latest hardware multicore and programming technologies, opening and saving a file with Photoshop CS4 remain a single-threaded task. Of course, some users might not need to handle photo files around 1 GB as Lloyd did it, but Adobe should not forget that CS4 is primarily targeting Pro users, having Pro needs and Pro hardware.

The compression and other stuff (whatever it is) in PSD or TIF format is a killer: it takes 7-8 times longer to save a file than without compression. If your work is being held up by this factor, save as uncompressed TIF, and onto a striped RAID. The latter provides a speedup of 13 times!

Sometimes a table tells it all:

Last but not least, we have also noted that once launched for the first time CS4 will be loading/checking all your fonts, so the first launch might be a bit long to be completed.