What OS, hardware config, and GPU do you have, Vahakn01?

Are you aware of the Auto Save feature?  I can imagine every 10 minutes it might stress your system noticeably to save gigabytes of data.

-Noel

As long as I keep file size to 2000 px on the longest side,or less, at no more than 200ppi, keep the history and cache set to Tall and Thin and make sure the brush spacing is set to at least 6, I can work fine with only minimal lag, but if I change any of those perameters the lag is awful. Using large brushes is almost impossible using the mixer brush with more than one layer.

I really hope they work on this because this is the only thing that I can see that mars this really nice program.

I encourage everyone reading this, and the other posts on this topic who is having the same problem to please speak up. If Adobe thinks this is only affecting a few people they may not feel it is necessary to fix it.

I'm not saying to make a huge fuss or anything, just let everyone know that it is affecting you too.

It makes no difference at all.

Here is my system information trimmed to save space:

Adobe Photoshop Version: 13.0 (13.0 20120305.m.415 2012/03/05:21:00:00) x64

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit

Version: 6.1 Service Pack 1

System architecture: Intel CPU Family:6, Model:14, Stepping:5 with MMX, SSE Integer, SSE FP, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, HyperThreading

Physical processor count: 4

Logical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 2926 MHz

Built-in memory: 16343 MB

Free memory: 13121 MB

Memory available to Photoshop: 14716 MB

Memory used by Photoshop: 71 %

Image tile size: 128K

Image cache levels: 4

OpenGL Drawing: Enabled.

OpenGL Drawing Mode: Advanced

OpenGL Allow Normal Mode: True.

OpenGL Allow Advanced Mode: True.

OpenGL Allow Old GPUs: Not Detected.

Video Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.

Video Card Renderer: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Display: 2

Display Bounds:=  top: 0, left: 1920, bottom: 900, right: 3360

Display: 1

Display Bounds:=  top: 0, left: 0, bottom: 1080, right: 1920

Video Card Number: 1

Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

OpenCL Unavailable

Driver Version: 8.950.0.0

Driver Date: 20120214000000.000000-000

Video Card Driver: aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll,aticfx32,aticfx32,aticfx32,ati umd64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atidxx64.dll,atiumdag,atidxx32,atidxx32,atiumdv a,atiumd6a.cap,atitmm64.dll

Video Mode: 1920 x 1080 x 4294967296 colors

Video Card Caption: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Video Card Memory: 1024 MB

Video Rect Texture Size: 16384

Serial number: Tryout Version

Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\

Temporary file path: C:\Users\Claudia\AppData\Local\Temp\

Photoshop scratch has async I/O enabled

Scratch volume(s):

  I:\, 97.7G, 97.4G free

Your times with those actions are comparable with others' times.  These are not significantly different than with Photoshop CS5 (if anything you appear to be seeing a bit faster performance with CS6).  Frankly, the Mixer Brush has always been a bit slow.

You might want to consider setting your Auto Save to a really long interval instead of turning it off entirely, so that if you've left your system alone for a long while and forgotten to save your work, it will protect you.

I think the next step would be for you to share a copy of a PSD file with which you are seeing lag while editing.  Are you seeing it only with very large files, or can you crop out a reasonably sized piece have it show the same thing?

There was another person here on the forum recently experiencing reproducible lag, and it turned out he had a really large radius outer glow configured as a layer style, which was chewing up a lot of CPU time when painting layers.

-Noel

I've been posting about lag on another thread too. I find the tools (healing, dodge/burn etc.) get sluggish the longer the CS6 instance is running. I do photo retouching and each image can have upwards of 50 adjustment layers and a dozen or more smart filters

It seems that after opening, editing, and saving many images (usually around 10-12) I find the tools become sluggish. It's tough to replicate since every image is different. I attempted to do the timing test last night when I noticed the sluggishness, but I accidentally hit the F1 key, and PS got into an endless loop dialog box (I expect Help is still VERY beta).

So I'm not sure if we are talking about the same problem, but it seems there are some sluggishness issues being reported in various threads.

I will try to keep my current instance of PS running and do the timing test again when I detect the sluggishness.

Ted

Ooops Noel! I think you'll find that when your action selects the Mixer Brush, it selects it with SAL not active! This means that even if you add the layer and activate SAL before running the action, the action cancels the SAL option. That will be why you get identical timings!

Pattie,

This action uses neither... it simply strokes the path.

T

I am using a Cintiq and a Wacom tablet at the same time.  Problems happens in both.  Also while zooming in or moving parts of a file.

TimShelbourne wrote:

 

Ooops Noel! I think you'll find that when your action selects the Mixer Brush, it selects it with SAL not active! This means that even if you add the layer and activate SAL before running the action, the action cancels the SAL option. That will be why you get identical timings!

I took that into account and inserted a stop so as to turn on SAL.  I really did test it properly.

-Noel

And you were painting on the added layer,... not still the background?

Absolutely Noel, we can do that... on a 4000 x 4000 pixel canvas, draw around the outer edge with the Round Fan, at a specific pixel size, counting seconds between corners, and see how long it takes for the stroke to catch up with what you're doing.

I'm really interested in comparing results from this simple approach between nVidia and ATI/AMD cards (with a few very specific CS6 performance settings)

T

Right now I am seeing the problem in spades.

Tim I did as you suggest, but my drawing was too erratic to figure the time. So I selected timing (at the bottom left drop down - usually used for dimensions) and simply dragged a 100px brush diagonally. The time it took to quickly swipe the stylus from corner to corner was negligible, but on 25 consecutive swipes the drawing time averaged 1.6 seconds with the shortest being .5 seconds and the longest being 2.8.

That is a wild variation. .5 seconds is not a problem. 2.8 seconds is.

So I tried it on a gray layer over a pattern and used the dodge tool. Sometimes it took 0.5 seconds to dodge at 100% with a 200px brush (typical for me), but 2 out of three passes were excruciatingly long - the worst was 5.2 seconds. It seems like the first pass would lag, the second would be fast, the next two would lag, and so on.

I doubt this is a sufficiently quantitative test, but it shows the problem.

Memory stats:

In Use: 6837 MB

Modified: 97 MB

Standby: 8780 MB

Free: 686 MB

Memory allocated to Ps 8703 MB

Win 7 ver. 6.1.7601.17514 - SP1

i7-2600K @ 3.4 GHz

Video: nvidi GTX 550Ti w/ 1GB

nvidia driver 8.17.12.9610

Physical Memory 16GB

Ted

Noel,

Thanks for your effort.

I may have missed a few posts here and there, my apologies if that's so. Are you running an nVidia card or an ATI/AMD/Radeon?

Thank you,

T

I have a VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 5670 1 GB DDR5.

Up to just now I've been running Photoshop CS6 in a VMware VM.  I've just gotten it installed on my host system, so I'm about to run through some of the same speed tests.  It starts a bit faster, and more menu entries are available (e.g., OpenCL).

-Noel

After some more experimentation, this is interesting stuff.

As you know, for a pretty unscientific test, I’ve been painting in a single stroke around the edges of a 4000 x 4000 pixel document with a bristle tip, using the Mixer Brush Tool on a separate layer above the white background. Settings for the MB were:

Wet: 80, Load 75, Mix 39 and SAL checked.

Bristle settings for the bristle tip were:

Bristles 16, Length 137, Thickness 1, Stiffness 56 with no other brush dynamics active. This is using the Round Blunt shape for the brush. Brush Size: 121 pixels.

For the first set of stroke timing tests in CS6 and then CS5 the brush was set to its default Spacing value (2%), to really give Photoshop something to chew on. Doing my pretty unscientific test of drawing around the outer edges of the document, at the various tile sizes gave these results:

CS6:

1028k: 22.8s

1024k: 22.4s

132k: 15.9s

128k: 15.1s

One interesting point here is that in CS6, completely turning off ‘Use Graphics Processor’ actually speeds the brush up quite significantly at the lower tile size settings, making the 128k: 15.1s above 128k: 12.5s! This effect is not apparent in CS5.

CS5:

1028k: 17.6s

1024k: 17.4s

132k: 11.5s

128k: 11.5s

So, I’s clear to see that there’s quite a timing difference between CS5 and CS6, across all tile sizes, with CS5 winning hands down every time.

Now… here’s the interesting bit. Of course, we know that increasing the spacing a little on the bristle tips speeds brush response up no end, so for the second run of tests I increased it to 5%, with these results:

CS6:

1028k: 8.4s

1024k: 8.4s

132k: 5.8s

128k: 5.9s

CS5:

1028k: 7.3s

1024k: 7.3s

132k: 5.9s

128k: 5.7s

So you can clearly see by this that increasing the Spacing to 5%, not only speeds up the performance of the brush (as you would expect), but oddly results in there being virtually no difference at all between the brush speed in CS6 and CS5. For me, this seems to indicate that something in CS6 is much more sensitive to low brush spacing in terms of brush speed than CS5 is? In reality, with a higher level of Spacing there is virtually no speed difference between the two.

I’m almost tempted to say that one solution to this could be to increase the default spacing for the standard Bristle Tip Presets in the Brush Presets to 5%, rather than 2%, but that doesn’t really address the issue of exactly why CS6 is more susceptible to the slow-down effects of low brush spacing!

In reality, increasing the spacing this much doesn’t introduce any really noticeable tyre-tracking, especially if you’re using a texture within the stroke (although I wasn’t here).

I was convinced that the MB slow-down in CS6 was purely a tile size/re-draw problem, but whilst smaller tile sizes make a difference to overall brush speed, that doesn’t explain why the speed differences between CS6 and CS5 apparently disappear at a higher brush spacing setting. Even though you’d expect the brush to be faster in both, you’d still expect to see the marked timing differences between the two.

Mike and Pattie, I’ll also email this to you privately.