To help plug-in developers make better decisions about when to create 64-bit versions of their products, I’d like to gather a little info about what operating system(s) you use to run Photoshop. If you’re using Photoshop CS4, please take a second to answer this simple three-question survey. (I’m asking specifically about CS4 customers as the 32-vs.-64-bit OS question doesn’t matter for CS3 or earlier.) Once I get a sufficient number of responses, I’ll share the findings here.
Thanks,
J.
How about finally offering CS4 on Linux, or Wine under Linux? I noticed it’s not listed in your survey.
[There are no plans to bring Photoshop to Linux in the near term. We’ve been working with the WINE guys separately to help their efforts. –J.]
As someone who manages quite a few windows machines I see that x64 is going to be the only way Vista is going to be installed in the near future. For a while the reason for installing 32bit Vista due to driver support. Today that issue has been resolved and there is no real reason to run 32bit Vista. 64bit is much more secure and has many other benefits.
It is surprising to me that with CS4 Adobe has not released a 64bit Windows version. The ability to address more than 4gb of ram is very important to Adobe users.
[Photoshop CS4 is indeed 64-bit-native & can address an effectively unlimited amount of RAM on XP64 and Vista64. –J.]
I use Vista 64bit. Looking to upgrade soon to CS4. Soo looking forward to it.
Vista x64 is a actually quite nice OS indeed, despite Vista’s bad press, and Photoshop x64 is quite wonderful when it can party with lots of RAM — which is now almost laughably cheap. The bottleneck isn’t software any longer, but hardware — motherboards and chipsets. Only server-oriented hardware supports more than 16 GB, but those mobos can usually not be overclocked, which galls tweakers like myself. But its both easy and cheap now to run a quad-core system @3.6 GHz with 16 GB, and Vista only hogs about 1 GB, leaving PS with almost 15 GB.
Jack,
I have been looking at a new PC 64 bit windows OS.
What would be the advantage of a 64 bit over a 32 bit?
I am able to get a clear answer to this question.
[It’s all about using more RAM (more than 4GB). I don’t think there’s any other benefit, though if I’m overlooking something, hopefully someone will chime in. –J.]
Merry Christmas
Ken in KY
[Thanks, Ken; same to you. 🙂 –J.]
Klaus – check out some of the new mobos from Gigabyte and Asus for i7 processors – the top end boards will take up to 24GB and are generally an overclocker’s dream in terms of options available 🙂
John…will this help to prompt 64bit flash? ;p
The ability to use more RAM is the main reason for using 64-bit Vista (you can only get to a little more than 3GB on a 32-bit system due to the need to reserve memory address space for hardware like the video card even if you have 4GB installed). But there are also security advantages with Vista 64 like hardware-backed Data Execution Protection (DEP) and kernel patch protection.
Mac OSX 10.5.6
I use and highly recommend Vista 64-bit as the best platform to run Photoshop CS4 at the moment. Photoshop really sings when it can address up to 7GB on my 8GB machine, especially when I’m stitching very large panoramas together.
When will we see a 64 bit version of the DNG codec for vista (not the converter)? I’ve been visiting the Labs website (http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Codec) unsuccessfully for way too long 🙂
Phil, yes, I know about the i7 CPU mobos and their six slots of triple-channel RAM –but they all use DDR3 RAM and 4 GB sticks of DDR3 is fairly expensive compared to the DDR2 sticks. But this situation will of course improve in the time ahead.
PSCS4 was dramatically improved under Vista 32 when I added memory and used the 3 GB ‘switch’. A 12 image collage panorama would not complete with 2GB (out of memory) but ran to completion with 3GB. Adobe should make this option better known, unless there are negative issues. I have not found any though.
For understanding 64bit systems, I tell people to go and read the 6 page diatribe on Ars: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/x86-64.ars
It turns out that a common misconception is that 64bit systems are faster; in fact, they are just able to assign larger addressable space. Think of it like a city. Each house has a number. Eventually, the numbers run out. In order to add more houses, more numbers need to be added. But by adding more numbers and more houses, this does not mean that traveling through the city is any faster.
You shouldn’t limit your survey to just those using CS4. What about those upgrading, or even thinking about upgrading? What about LightRoom users? We want 64-bit compatibility.
[Lightroom 2 is 64-bit-native on both Mac and Windows and has been for 6+ months. –J.]
If you want to see if it’s worth the trouble to code for 64-bit you need to see the potential, not just those that you have money from.
[I was trying to narrow things down to just the market that’s buying CS4 and that would need/pay for 64-bit plug-ins right now. –J.]
Ken, even if you don’t have more than 4GB of RAM it should be a tad faster to run the 64 bit version due to the extra registers that this mode provides.
I’m an x64 user (and a Mac user as well), and I’m looking forward to making the upgrade to CS4.
HOWEVER, I’ve made that jump on my Mac, and was surprised that Adobe ripped out the “Change Layer Content” option for shape layers in CS4. This adds several steps to the process of creating a gradient shape layer. Is there a better way to create these that has been added in CS4? Are gradient shape layers being deprecated? What’s the deal?
See equally delighted users here:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6e5bb?@384.I03liXqt1qw@
and here:
http://adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6d09a
Since both I and most other folks posting at John Nack’s blog so often give Adobe a harrrrd time for all the things they screw up, I’d like to say that I think it’s simply FANTASTIC that Adobe has given us (Windows!) users a great 64-bit version of Photoshop — and ALL FOR FREE! We get both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions for the same price as earlier versions. I, for one, would gladly have paid Adobe several hundred dollars extra to get a 64-bit version — but I didn’t have to, they just gave me that, despite the sizable engineering effort this must have entailed. So all hats off to Adobe for giving us this great Xmas present! 🙂
[Thanks, Klaus. You can direct the extra couple hundred bucks to the JNack Personal Development Fund if you’d like. 😉 –J.]
I mainly use Vista 64bit. I have a 4-core machine with 8GB memory. The main motivation is running multiple heavy applications together, not for Photoshop to use the entire RAM.
I use both Lightroom and Photoshop (plus a bunch of other stuff)
I end up using Photoshop 32 bit most of the time due to the 3rd party filter issue.
Agree with Arnon, although the only filter I miss for PS 64-bit is Imagenomic’s Noiseware.
Yea runs fine here too, vista64 + cs3 and cs4. They’re all getting along quite nicely.
Vistas been fine from the beginning, it argued with some version of acrobat once but that’s about it, so far.
Ok,I’m a lightweight hobby user whose files are less than 100 MB for the most part. I just got a 32-bit Vista laptop this year and perhaps in three years my next will most likely be 64-bit if this becomes commonplace. So it will be 32 bit CS4 for now.
I use Windows XP 64-bit and recently got CS4. I did a full install and it seemed to install two versions, one marked 64 bit. But that version does not work with my PC.
So, I use the other one.
Hi guys – I’m not a techie, so be nice…
I have CS3 (upgraded from 7.0) that I am trying to load onto a new Vista 64 bit system.
It doesn’t even come up….
Are they are patches, etc. that we need to try. I’ve been searching and I can’t find a clean answer, is there an easy fix… besides buying CS4?
thank you
I am still waiting for Flash Player 64 bit. I hope it is released soon. I cannot play videos from U of M as I am using OFFICE 2007 for downloading all of my e-mails. I am sending a letter to the University to ask them to not support Adobe flash player videos or offer them in another format.
[Why not just run a 32-bit browser? Have you found any evidence that a 64-bit browser offers advantages over a 32-bit one? (Presumably you don’t want to allocate more than 4GB of RAM to your browser alone, so let’s rule that out.) All I could find in searching just now were these numbers, but they’re flawed in comparing Firefox 3.0 x32 to Firefox 3.1 x64.
I’m not saying the Flash Player team shouldn’t offer a 64-bit version of their code. They will. I’m just a bit tired of seeing them beaten over the head without seeing any evidence of why people shouldn’t simply run a 32-bit browser. –J.]
How do I run a 32 bit browser on my 64 bit operating system so that we can “see and hear” things again? Help Please
I have been using 64 bit versions of Windows exclusively for about the last half year.
These include Server 2003R2, XP, Server 2008, Vista, Server 2008R2, and Windows 7.
anyone answer rebecca’s question: How do I run a 32 bit browser on my 64 bit operating system so that we can “see and hear” (e.g Flash Player) things again? Help Please
Rebecca & Carl: just install any 32-bit browser! I have Opera on Vista x64/Win7 x64 and Flash 10 installs and runs fine inside them.
On Vista 64, you have both 32 and 64 bit versions of Internet Explorer installed and you can choose to launch either one (so if you launch 32bit then Flash will install and work).
I’d like to add a vote to the box marked Linux, even though at the moment as you say you don’t plan to support it.
+1 for Linux for me, would love to see native support.