Photoshop CS2 benchmarks

I thought you might be interested in this ... but no, I didn't go mad and buy PS CS2 for OS X and XP, I downloaded the trials.

For this, I tested the test actions from driverheaven.com with the same VM, first time with 512MB RAM assigned, second time with 1GB RAM assigned, and compared to Mac OS X (1.83 GHz Core Duo). Remember, it's running in Rosetta on OS X:

Code:

                        XP 512MB    XP 1GB      OS X 2GB
Texturiser Test         2.9         2.2         3.2
CMYK Colour Conversion  7.6         6.9         10.2
RGB Colour Conversion   25.4        8.0         11.6
Dust and Scratches      22.9        8.4         13.0
Watercolor              39.8        38.9        45.2
Texturiser              14.0        17.3        3.9
Stained Glass           15.8        17.8        12.7
Lighting effects        19.6        10.3        25.8
Mosaic Tiles            19.1        29.9        68.6
Extrude                 125.5       111.1       145.0
Smart Blur              74.0        71.3        173.2
Underpainting           27.9        38.8        55.6

So, the VM is faster than Mac OS X (expected) and it's generally faster with 1GB (also expected) but a couple tests were slower than with 512MB (unexpected). In OS X, operations that are multicore aware are the fastest.

I'm guessing that 1GB is close to the limit on a 2GB host and there may be some slow downs due to memory allocation. Running the test again with 1GB RAM resulted in speed ups in some tests and slow downs in others.

But the conclusion is, I guess, if you have a windows licence for CS2, use it in a VM, until Adobe release CS3 universal.

 

I did something similar with a "homebrew" test -- a liquify mesh filter which I saved and applied to the same image in OS X, XP in Parallels, and XP via Boot Camp. The machine is a Core Duo mini with 2GB of RAM.

XP via Boot Camp took 36 seconds, XP in Parallels was 44, so not too bad a hit at all (well worth the time saved by not rebooting!). OS X in Rosetta, of course, was slow -- 77 seconds or so. Ouch. As a reference point, my Dual G5 running CS2 took 28 seconds, so I'm quite impressed by the mini's performance, in either Boot Camp or Parallels mode, against a much more expensive machine.

-rob.