Photoshop 64 Bit Performance

[Nathan]

I'm running Photoshop CS6 64-bit on my Windows 7 desktop computer.  It has 16gigs of ram, quad core intel i-7 4.1ghz chip, and gforce 680 GTX video card.

When trying to open a 300mb .psd file it takes my computer ~5-10 minutes and then if I drag anything on the screen it's very choppy and slow.  What can I do to improve the performance? 

I don't have a SSD yet, I'm wondering if that will improve the performance in photoshop?

[Nathan]

Got it working with this:

 

 

Scratch disks are definitely contributing to the problem and need to be addressed first because scratch disks are used by Photoshop to store the large temporary files that it creates while opening and working on image files and enable multiple undo levels.

By default, the scratch disk is the same drive on which your software is installed - usually Drive C. 

Since the default Drive C is also used by Windows OS for creating its temporary files, Photoshop does not have enough workspace if only the default Drive C is the scratch disk. That which will drastically impact performance when opening, working on or saving large files.

Go to your Preferences menu and select Plugins & Scratch Disks. Choose your Drives with the most free space as your First, Second and Third scratch disks. The drive on which Windows OS is installed should be the last choice.

Store and open your image files also on the Drive with the maximum free space. 

Now restart Photoshop and you should notice much better performance.

If there are still issues, the reason is probably your graphics card which can also be a bottle neck when working on large files.

[taki]

I was about to say that your scratch disk might be the problem. I would also like to suggest that something else might be going on. I have a similar computer but with 32 gig of memory rather than 16 gig. I also have a SSD which does speed things up but I still think that the times you were seeing is a big problem. Your computer should not have been taking that long to open a 300 meg file nor should it cause choppiness on your screen.

[mikka254]

The problem with photoshop is that they created the software with their macs in mind so the performance of a low performing pc will cause the software to crash. Luckily, you can easily upgrade your pc to perform even better than a mac buy installing a better graphics card and better ram. And if your rom is not up-gradable then minimize the stuff you save on your pc or laptop.

[Nathan]

The problem with photoshop is that they created the software with their macs in mind so the performance of a low performing pc will cause the software to crash. Luckily, you can easily upgrade your pc to perform even better than a mac buy installing a better graphics card and better ram. And if your rom is not up-gradable then minimize the stuff you save on your pc or laptop.

I already have a big video card and 16gb of ram.

[queenbellevue]

The problem with photoshop is that they created the software with their macs in mind so the performance of a low performing pc will cause the software to crash. Luckily, you can easily upgrade your pc to perform even better than a mac buy installing a better graphics card and better ram. And if your rom is not up-gradable then minimize the stuff you save on your pc or laptop.

 

Is this really true? I've been using older versions of photoshop on my crappy laptop (core i3, 4 gb ram) and while it is kinda slow, I've never had any major issues. Of course I only exclusively made short, light gifs so maybe that's why