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.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 - Retouch Artists Speed Test

Hyper Threading does have a real benefit in Photoshop and thus we see the Core i5 750 suffering a bit. It's still faster than the Phenom II 965 BE but it is marginally slower than the i7 920. The 870 is bested only by the i7 975.

SYSMark 2007 Performance Video Encoding Performance
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  • Jeremiahx99 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link

    biased? they where comparing stock vs stock how can u call that biased, and people is not stupid lol whats that mean?
  • BlueBlazer - Sunday, September 13, 2009 - link

    Clock to clock comparison with turbo off..

    http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=776&type=...">http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=776&type=...

    Phenom II 965 comes in last place, due to IPC differences which is why AMD had to release higher clocked (should I say "overclocked") Phenom II to compete against Core 2 and Core i5/i7 series.
  • MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, September 10, 2009 - link

    Why compare to a Phenom OCd by 600mhz? The Phenom doesn't do it automatically like the i7
  • ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, September 10, 2009 - link

    It's biased because Intel is giving you more features?? The whole point of comparison is to determine which is better. Next you'll say it's biased because it's comparing a Nehalem to a Phenom II.
  • ClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - link

    "people is not stupid. "

    Nice
  • goinginstyle - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - link

    Somebody ban this SnakeOil idiot.
  • Etern205 - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link

    NDA is lifted! Huzzah!!!
  • philosofool - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link

    Now all I need is for Newegg to get in on the act!
  • Casper42 - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - link

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • tcool93 - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - link

    I'm posting this to an older review, but just wanted to make a comment. I noticed all the reviews that have the Q9650 included, compare it to the Phenom 965... which isn't a fair comparison at all, because the Phenom 965 is running at a considerably faster mhz than the Q9650 is. Plus the Q9650 can overclock much faster with no voltage increase. I would bet the Q9650 is faster than the Phenom 965 at the same clock speeds.

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