After seeing countless benchmarks pitting Photoshop CS2 (under Rosetta) against CS3 (native), I began to wonder why nobody had bothered to run the real test – same app, same computer, different OSes. With the Photoshop CS3 beta being a native MacOS app and Boot Camp allowing us to run Windows natively, we now have a way to test a major app on each platform with no other variables. The hope is to see which platform runs the same piece of software faster.

The most popular benchmark for Photoshop lately has been the Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test. According to the website, "After weeks of research and many hours of consultation with fellow creative professionals we have designed, built and tested an action that runs a mixture or real world operations. This enables you to test your systems efficiency against other machines . . ."

I had the perfect test machine, too – a day-old midrange Macbook (2.0GHz Core2Duo and 1GB RAM, 10.4.8 for the uninformed.) Windows XP (Pro, SP2) was a vanilla install on a 9GB NTFS partition via Boot Camp. For added variety, I decided to test the popular virtual machines as well. Parallels was set to boot from the Boot Camp partition with Parallels Tools and Parallels Boot Camp installed, while VMWare Fusion was booted from an 8GB NTFS image with VMWare Tools installed.

The tests were run twice for each environment – after a reboot and with no other programs open, Photoshop was timed (1) opening, (2) running the benchmark a first time, (3) reopening, and (4) re-running the benchmark. The stopwatch function of my iPod was used to record the times.

The benchmarks were run using the settings suggested by their creator of 1 history state, 4 cache levels, and 100% memory usage (vs. the defaults of 20 history states, 6 cache levels and 55% memory usage). Lower numbers are better.

 

 

 

 

It should be noted the Parallels and VMWare results are remarkably slower due in part to having less RAM available than the native OS (512MB was the default in Parallels, and I increased the RAM in VMWare from 256MB to 512MB to better compare the two). Also, VMWare was able to use 2 CPU cores while Parallels only currently supports one.

-Hans

December 23rd, 2006