Get more from your graphics card

Adobe recommends a GPU backed up by a minimum of 128MB of graphics memory for accelerating Photoshop CS4, with 256MB preferred and 512MB or more suggested for handling really large or multiple images.

Sadly, dual graphics cards are not exploited by CS4, so if you’re ‘speccing-up’ a new system specifically for use with Photoshop, get yourself a single card with a fast GPU and plenty of memory.

In its trouble-shooting section Adobe also advises downloading the very latest graphics driver for your chipset.

Unlike Nvidia’s Cuda, which is only supported on Geforce 8 GPUs upwards, Adobe CS4 should make use of earlier chipsets with the company quoting compatibility with certain Geforce 6 and Radeon X1000 models onwards ­ again, so long as they and their drivers support the requirements above.

If your current graphics configuration is supported, you’ll see your chipset listed and a box to Enable OpenGL Drawing on the Performance tab under Preferences; an Advanced settings button allows you to further configure the OpenGL options.

I first tried Photoshop CS4 running on a Quad Core 9650 system with 2GB of Ram and an ageing Geforce 6600 graphics card with 256MB of video memory.

The application recognised the chipset and, with OpenGL Drawing enabled, offered the enhancements described above. The free canvas rotation and hand-toss features felt responsive, although they weren’t as silky smooth as seen in some demos.

When throwing around a very large 300MB image file, there were also fractional delays while new portions represented by a lower resolution preview were replaced by the actual pixel-level detail. To be fair, this was a huge file being handled by a relatively old chipset, so the performance was still impressive.

I noticed the ‘Use for Image Display’ box under Advanced Drawing on the Advanced OpenGL options was unticked by default.

Enabling this option and restarting Photoshop saw a dramatic reduction in the speed and fluidity of the rotation and scrolling, so I kept it disabled.

To see if Photoshop’s performance would benefit from a quicker graphics card, I switched the Geforce 6600 for a faster Geforce 8600 GTS model, albeit with the same amount of video memory.

The zooming, tossing and rotating felt fractionally smoother with the same 300MB file, but there was hardly anything between it and the older Geforce 6600 card, which leads me to believe graphics memory was the limiting factor here.

Switching to a smaller 60MB file with both cards saw improvements to response, although again there was little between them.