6 Replies Latest reply: Oct 25, 2008 5:47 AM by penderra RSS

    CS4 very slow

    penderra Community Member
      I am getting lots of problems with CS4, some of which have been covered in separate topics on this forum. In the main, it seems to me that there is a real problem with CS4 processing relatively small amounts of data. The difficulties I am experiencing are:

      1. Text tool very slow. Just typing a few letters sees my CPU usage shoot to 50%. There is a lag of about a second between typing the letters and their appearance on the screen.

      2. Pen tool very slow with significant lag when using the mouse and CPU again shoots to 50%, even for a short line. If I use the tablet (Trust) it sometimes works, but suffers the same lag as the mouse when it does. Most of the time, though, I just get a faint straight line between the start and end point. This morning I got the same straight line symptom on the mouse!

      3. Screen redraw can be painfully slow and blocky, but this fault is really sporadic

      4. There is no apparent difference whether I have GPU active or not. However, I have just had a strange message. When GPU was disabled I restarted CS4 and got the message that there was a problem with the display driver, and PS was therefore disabling GPU enhancements! After that, the pen worked fine, and the mouse too, but then the mouse started losing curves.

      I experience none of these problems when I run CS.

      My video card driver is up to date. The trust tablet driver is the latest, but I really do not think this is the issue, as the drawing problem also affects the mouse.

      System spec - XP with SP3, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+, 2GB RAM, nVidia Geforce 7600GT, Program on Raptor 70GB, Scratch on separate 70GB Raptor
        • 1. Re: CS4 very slow
          Chris Cox Adobe Employee
          1) the only time we've seen it that bad was due to corrupt font files.

          The rest does sound like you have some sort of video driver problem.

          Have you updated the video card driver?
          • 2. Re: CS4 very slow
            penderra Community Member
            I updated the video driver just after I upgraded to CS4, and I have checked today that it is still the latest.

            The really weird thing is that the problems are not constant. Most of the time they are there, the rest of the time it's OK. When there is a problem, it's not all of them either.

            I have now noticed that my pen works just after I open PS. However, if I change to drawing with the mouse, or change to another tool, then I just get the faint straight lines as in 2 above. I have contacted the maker to see if they can fix the driver.

            I noticed that when I ran slide show the temp on the video card went very high, so I have ramped up the fan in case the temp is causing the card to throttle on me. Would this be likely?

            However, I still don't understand why I am getting the message that the GPU enhancements are being cut when GPU is not enabled anyway.
            • 3. Re: CS4 very slow
              Chris Cox Adobe Employee
              The error message is probably because when Photoshop asks the video driver for it's name and capabilities, the driver returns an error. Photoshop is trying to find out if it can enable GPU support, and the driver is too buggy to even answer correctly.
              • 4. Re: CS4 very slow
                penderra Community Member
                I think you are right about the driver. I have now noticed that there is banding in even the simplest of gradients. In fact there is banding in the blue Photoshop splash screen - I assume that is not normal?
                • 5. Re: CS4 very slow
                  Chris Cox Adobe Employee
                  No, that is not normal.
                  • 6. Re: CS4 very slow
                    penderra Community Member
                    I have uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, and the banding is gone. Just all the other problems now :)