Quick Look: Photoshop CS3 Beta Performance Test

It wasn’t obvious how to do it from the web pages of Adobe Labs, but I did get a copy of Photoshop CS3 Beta downloaded and running on both my MacBook Pro and my dual G5 PowerMac. I also downloaded the Photoshop speed test from Retouch Artists. I ran the Retouch Artists’ speed test on both machines using Photoshop CS2 and CS3 Beta. I thought the results were pretty interesting. Here they are:

MacBook Pro, 2.33 GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon X1600 (128MB)
Photoshop CS3 Beta, 56 secs
Photoshop CS2, 2 min 22 secs

PowerMac Dual 2.0 GHz G5, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800 OEM (128 MB)
Photoshop CS3 Beta, 1 min 26 secs
Photoshop CS2, 1 min 16 secs (12% faster on G5 platform)

Comparing the CS3 results on the two machines, the Intel Core 2 Duo appears to be faster than the G5 clock-for-clock.

Comparing the CS3 and CS2 results on the G5 shows that CS2 is still better optimized for the G5 than the CS3 beta. That might change over time, but I suspect Adobe will spend more time optimizing CS3 for the Intel Macs than for the G5 just due to market considerations.

The MacBook Pro results show the impact of Rosetta, though all the speed difference cannot be explained away that way. The G5 results show that CS3 might be natively slower than CS2 and I have no way to quantify how much, if any, that might be.