Choppy performance in Photoshop

[btyne]

I bought a 2013 27" iMac i7 3.5ghz / 8gb ram / 780m a couple days ago and I'm a little surprised by how poorly photoshop is handling my design files. I made a video showing how choppy moving my comp around the screen is.

http://youtu.be/w8XgjJ1vI4k

Now obviously I'm not moving it around this much all the time but I do move it often in addition to moving elements of the design naturally. In all cases it is a bit jerky/choppy. If this is normal for a 4gb video card then I wonder if I'm just overly sensitive about the performance and this is fine to most people. I would figure a 4gb video card would have this moving around pretty smoothly.

Thoughts from those who use Photoshop for web/graphic design?

 

[btyne]

So I reinstalled Photoshop and apparently that made it better. I still feel like it should be smoother. I did a Cinebench test and was getting 60 on the GPU test. I then repaired disk permissions and rebooted. I then re-ran the GPU test and now I'm getting consistent 89. So I'm not sure what was going on before.

 

[thekev]

I then re-ran the GPU test and now I'm getting consistent 89. So I'm not sure what was going on before.

It's unlikely that your problems are due to hardware limitations. The drive comes into play if it has to load textures or photoshop has to deal with scratch disks. The gpu is unimportant there. Repeat that 10 times. The gpu is not important in photoshop. It uses the gpu, and it fills up a fair amount of vram. Your problem sounds more like one of slow scratch disks though. If it's an HDD and more than 60% full, I might suggest moving some things off it. Disk Warrior might help a little too, but I find it difficult to recommend the $100 purchase. In my experience it makes disk access a little smoother, but Apple's choice of HFS+ file systems was always terrible.

 

[btyne]

I'm just using the 3tb fusion drive for my scratch disk. it isn't even below 2.5tb consumed. I found that removing the rulers and increasing the cache levels helped smooth it out some but it is still not as fast as my windows machine that uses a 1gb GTS450 graphics card. Of course I turned off the graphics processing in photoshop since it ended up making a huge improvement on the performance with that system. With the iMac there is not that much of a difference unfortunately. I'm hearing there is some driver problems with Photoshop and Yosemite. I wish I could compare with Mavericks to see if there is a difference. Needless to say, its a bit of a disappointment. Every other program I've used has been fine with the new iMac but Photoshop performance was the whole reason I bought the new iMac over just using my 15" Macbook Pro.

 

[thekev]

Driver problems are certainly possible. I forgot to consider that, but they cause a lot more problems with applications like PS than raw processing power of your gpu. On Windows there are a couple features that require specific gpu models (10 bit displayport), but even then it's not a matter of their computational power. It's again mostly a driver thing. I'll see if I can find any fixes.