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Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance

To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.

The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.

Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.

Photoshop CS4 continues to be more comfortable with Intel CPUs, as even the Core 2 Quad Q9400 is able to outperform the X4 955. The cream of the crop here is Intel's Core i7 though, even a 920 is able to outperform the fastest Core 2 Quad we have here.