Intel Photoshop question.

Leicaman said:

Uwe,

I am a bit confusesd on the whole 64 bit/ dual processor thing.

Click to expand...

Most people are... no problem.

leicaman said:

Does either WinXP or OSX run 64 bit? Will the next version of OSX
be 64 BIT? What is the difference... just added speed. I think
that Vista will be 64 BIT.. correct?

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Windows XP Pro and Home are 32-bit, but there is a 64-bit version. OS X supports 64-bit at the UNIX level, not within the graphical user interface. Leopard will add full 64-bit support, including GUI. Vista will be available in some 20 different versions, which I can hardly tell apart, but the standard versions will be all 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available. On Windows running 32-bit applications (that's almost all client applications) on a 64-bit system causes them to slow down, in some cases significantly as the overhead is too big. From what Apple stated during the WWDC, I understand that Leopard will support 64-bit without causing a performance penalty for 32-bit applications. Most applications will stay on 32-bit for many years to come - the installed OS base of operating systems on the client side is almost 100% and especially companies and government bodies upgrade in pretty slow cycles of 5 years or more... No MS or Adobe and most others will not go there yet, and for a whole lot of applications it does not make sense either. 64-bit systems that make sense include large scale enterprise data warehouses, scientific computations etc. nobody normally uses that on a client machine.

leicaman said:

Why would XP Home not be able to access dual processors under
BootCamp? Is that the reason BootCamp requires WX Pro SP2? So
WinXP Home would be able to take full advantage of the hardware in
Parallels?

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It is a licensing issue. The Home license is valid for one CPU (the number of cores does not matter), the Pro license is covering 2 CPUs (also here the number of cores is irrelevant). So, yes to make full use of both CPUs under Bootcamp you need a Pro license. Under Parallels Windows does only see the virtual machine and the virtual machine then distributes the tasks within the host system (OS X). Therefore XP Home (or 98, ME, 2000 etc.) will not be able to tell how many CPUs it is dealing with.

HTH,
Uwe

Uwe:\,

You wrote:

Under Parallels Windows does only see the virtual machine and the virtual machine then distributes the tasks within the host system (OS X). Therefore XP Home (or 98, ME, 2000 etc.) will not be able to tell how many CPUs it is dealing with.

Does this mean that apps will run slower under Parallels or will there no difference in speed?

Rich

Leicaman said:

Uwe:\,

You wrote:

Under Parallels Windows does only see the virtual machine and the
virtual machine then distributes the tasks within the host system
(OS X). Therefore XP Home (or 98, ME, 2000 etc.) will not be able
to tell how many CPUs it is dealing with.

Does this mean that apps will run slower under Parallels or will
there no difference in speed?

Click to expand...

It think the working of a virtual machine is not really well-known... Parallels is in simple terms a generic virtual computer - everything CPU, RAM, disk, ports, graphics card etc. is virtual. The performance of the virtual components is irrelevant in most cases - Parallels will distribute the processes across all available cores, so there is no direct performance penalty, other than the latency created by this process (minor, but existent) and the lack of specific hardware support, as there is no specific hardware. For most applications that do not access hardware directly the performance under Parallels is very good (I would say between 80 and 90%), with Photoshop the penalty is a little bigger (not sure why, but assume the high memory usage plays a role here) - it's more like 70% overall and 50-60% with filters. All these percentages are rough guesses, but quite in line with tests I have seen. Where Parallels really starts to hurt is with applications that require hardware acceleration through specific drivers (3D, games, etc.). As you cannot install specific drivers for a virtual GPU there is no way out. For office apps, PS, etc. the GPU does not matter. Anyhow - the number of CPUs is fully irrelevant under Parallels - it does not ignore them, it just does not display them to the guest OS.

If somebody uses Windows apps 90% of the time and is not working on files from both OS's - Bootcamp is certainly faster with the correct Win XP version and specific drivers. If you add a shareware called MacDrive to Windows XP you can also access HFS+ partitions from Windows, so you can share files and work on the same data from both OSs. If you multi-task or work on both OSs - the minor slowdown caused by Parallels is still better than the time required for rebooting.

I would get a trial version of Parallels and test it - if you like the performance, great. If not, simply delete it - there is no damage, no partitioning, no mess of files distribute all over the machine - it's not a Windows program... start the Bootcamp assistant and less than an hour later you can work at full performance under Bootcamp.

Cheers,
Uwe

Uwe,

The only app I contemplate running in WinXP is PS CS2 and Panorama factory... From what you say it seems like these apps would not run much faster in BootCamp.

R

Leicaman said:

Uwe,

The only app I contemplate running in WinXP is PS CS2 and Panorama
factory... From what you say it seems like these apps would not run
much faster in BootCamp.

R

Click to expand...

I cannot say anything about Panorama Factory (don't know it)... and the benchmark vs. real-life discussion is always an odd one. My main use for Photoshop nowadays is preparing graphics for Final Cut or DVD Studio Pro - I happily do not use it for photography at all... in this workflow you normally have to go back and forth several times to see how your results come out when output via DV or SDI to a real video monitor from the editor. Doing a reboot every time is simply not possible - it would accumulate to hours a day, so Parallels is the only solution - I also tried Crossover, but the most polite word I have for it in its current state is junk, no professional would save some 80 bucks for a Windows license just to work with unusable software.

I find rebooting annoying - I normally only reboot after an OS X upgrade. I want to have certain Finder windows open and see my pending items etc. Setting everything up again after a reboot is painful. Compared to all that, the performance penalty of the virtual machine is literally non-existent.

Yes - you get slightly better performance under Bootcamp and if you work in Photoshop exclusively without any involvement of OS X applications, it is certainly the better solution. If you need to access other application, have Mail open, etc. I find the Parallels solution much more convenient and it is not only "good enough" or "usable" - it is actually really fast.

Cheers,
Uwe

Uwe,

What I will be doing in PS CS2 could more or less be considered digital darkroom work. I will be cropping, buring, dodging, adjsuting contrast and color using adjustment layers.. I am going to be scanning a number of 6X6 color and B&W slides and negs and working on the results. Some of the files will be quite large 700+ megs each... but I don't think that any slowdown caudes by parallels will be a hindrence. Not like rendering huge video files at least. I will not be working with RAW until I get a digital camera... after I have processed an enormous amount of TIFF files from the scans. By early next year PS CS3 should be out and I will load that and use it.

R

Right at this moment the fastests way to photoshop on intel macs is:

1st Bootcamp to windows - windows version of PS
2nd PowerPC version of PS running under rosetta
3rd Parallels for windows - windows version of PS

There are some timings and additional links here:

http://www.everymac.com/articles/q&a/windows_on_mac/faq/parallels-speed-compared-to-boot-camp.html

The reason bootcamp is faster is because Apple wrote windows device drivers that utilise the graphics cards native features, whereas paralles goes through an emulated graphics environment. I read recently that the Parallels team are looking at how to handle graphics better so there is hope that this situation will improve.

However, on the newer faster macs, the performance of the PowerPC version of CS2 under rosetta is OK, and hardly worth the hassle of a reboot unless there's a large batch of complex edits to be processed.

Najinsky

Najinsky said:

Right at this moment the fastests way to photoshop on intel macs is:

1st Bootcamp to windows - windows version of PS
2nd PowerPC version of PS running under rosetta
3rd Parallels for windows - windows version of PS

Click to expand...

This might be true for the Mac Pro with sufficient RAM and the 2.66 or 3 GHz CPUs, it is certainly not on iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook Pro's and minis. Photoshop runs faster under Parallels than under Rosetta on all of them. Also the memory requirement running under Rosetta is significantly higher and on all machines with a low max. memory limit this kicks in quite early.

Member said:

The reason bootcamp is faster is because Apple wrote windows device
drivers that utilise the graphics cards native features, whereas
paralles goes through an emulated graphics environment.

Click to expand...

Wrong. I do not believe Apple writes any device drivers - they had the OEM suppliers provide them - and they have them anyhow, because most of the components exist for Windows as well. Nothing in Parallels is emulated! It is a virtual machine. Virtualization != Emulation. The virtual GPU in Parallels does not exist at all - therefore there are no native hardware features that can be supported. They can improve it by changing the virtual specs and make it more efficient for the guest system. Photoshop does not access the graphics hardware directly on any system and the performance of PS is independent of the graphics card. It is also interesting that some heavy games run faster under Parallels than under Bootcamp, something which nobody could really explain so far...

Member said:

However, on the newer faster macs, the performance of the PowerPC
version of CS2 under rosetta is OK, and hardly worth the hassle of
a reboot unless there's a large batch of complex edits to be
processed.

Click to expand...

For most work it is ok in all these scenarios. I spend 90% of my time in PS looking at the image and deciding what I want to do next or drawing selections... both tasks take exactly the same time on every system. For people in a production environment that use a lot of pre-recorded actions or do heavy compositing every little bit of performance is time and money.

Cheers,
Uwe

Uwe,

I take it you prefer Parallels to BootCamp?

Parallesls to me seems the safeest way to run WINdows on a Mac as it seems to be sandboxed and would be simple to restore....

This will only be an issue to me until I can get CS3...

Leicaman said:

Uwe,

I take it you prefer Parallels to BootCamp?

Parallesls to me seems the safeest way to run WINdows on a Mac as
it seems to be sandboxed and would be simple to restore....

This will only be an issue to me until I can get CS3...

Click to expand...

Yes. I do clearly prefer Parallels. It is safer, no hassle (configuration free and no partitioning) AND (this is the unique feature of virtual machines): I can put my entire Windows installation (1 virtual disk file) on a 8 GB USB drive and move it between Macs. Nothing to synchronise, no need to deal with different drivers... it works the same on a MacBook Pro, a Mini, an iMac and the Mac Pro. I would almost say it makes Windows somehow usable... but I'd better not say that

Cheers,
Uwe

uwe_r said:

This might be true for the Mac Pro with sufficient RAM and the 2.66
or 3 GHz CPUs, it is certainly not on iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook
Pro's and minis.

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They aren't my tests, they are the ones performed at C~Net as described in this link:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6546370.html

He claims the tests were don on a MBP 17" with 2GB ram. Some of the comments to the article also express surprise at the parallels result but no one posted alternative results to counter the claim. Could be an opportunity for you to provide them some feedback

I'm a Parallels fan but I only use it for software that isn't available on the mac. I don't see the point of bloating the VM with something I already have installed on the Mac. Also my only primary of PS was for photo processing and Aperture takes care of that now so I rarely fire up PS.

uwe_r said:

Wrong. I do not believe Apple writes any device drivers - they had
the OEM suppliers provide them - and they have them anyhow, because
most of the components exist for Windows as well. Nothing in
Parallels is emulated! It is a virtual machine. Virtualization !=
Emulation.

Click to expand...

Fair cop, some poor wording on my part, I was thinking about other graphics/videos scenarios, rather than specifically PS. While I appreciate that Apple don't do the actual low level coding, with bootcamp it IS Apple who are providing you with those drivers to enable a native windows installation that can make full use of graphics processing capabilities such a direct x support. However, for Photoshop specifically, I accept it should not be a factor.

Regarding the virtual bit. There is no reason why a virtual machine can't be an emulation. Virtualization can = emulation. I know Parallels Desktop is a virtualization product not an emulator, but I think there must be some minimal hardware or API emulation occurring, or are you saying Parallels definately has no emulation whatsoever? Or were you just refering to the graphics subsystem?

uwe_r said:

interesting that some heavy games run faster under Parallels than
under Bootcamp, something which nobody could really explain so
far...

Click to expand...

Could also be an indicator of something emulated. Emulating slow hardware in memory can oftern lead to a performance gain; for example a ram disk.

Regards,
Naj