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By AppleInsider Staff
Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 11:00 am PT (02:00 pm ET)
Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 11:00 am PT (02:00 pm ET)
Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. are reportedly working behind the scenes to improve the performance of Adobe's Photoshop under Apple's next-generation Leopard operating system.
In an forum post made a few weeks ago, Adobe's Russell Williams explained how the integration of Photoshop with Leopard, due out a bit later this spring, will overcome an existing barrier to performance in the current version of the Mac OS X.
'Buffering is disabled by default in CS3 (Creative Suite 3) when running on Tiger because of an OS issue. Every 30 seconds, the OS pauses Photoshop for anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds as it manages that giant buffer cache,' he wrote.
'If you're painting, this is a big problem, and it's why we made the 'disable VM buffering' plugin available for CS2. Apple says that issue is fixed in Leopard, but we haven't verified that yet.'
In his post, Williams said Adobe's current plan for Photoshop CS3 is to enable VM buffering for big RAM machines running Leopard and disable it for Tiger.
'But we'll provide an 'enable VM buffering' plugin to override this on Tiger if you don't mind the Tiger pause,' he added.
If you set the Cache Level higher, files will open slower but Photoshop will be more responsive while editing larger files. When Photoshop runs out of RAM, it will write to the hard disk. This is called your scratch disk. For best results, get another hard drive besides the one Photoshop is installed on.