CS4 and non-intel G5s, issues?

[oogieboogiex]

Chatting with a friend recently, he was saying he's had nothing but issues with trying to run CS4 on a non-Intel G5. Crashing, freezing, etc.

Here at work we've been discussing possibly upgrading from CS3. A MDD G4 would have to be replaced obviously, but we've got a couple of pre-intel quad 2.5GHz G5s with bout 4.5GB ram each.

Are there many known issues with trying to get CS4 to run properly on these machines? Obviously, having to replace 3 machines instead of 1 will make a difference in what happens... in which case we may just wait for CS5...

 

[sigmadog]

Up until late April 2009, I was running CS4 (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Fireworks) on my Dual 2.0 G5 (5.5GB RAM) without a hitch.

Some functions were a little slow, but everything worked as expected. There may be a few features that only work on Intel machines, but I can't recall specifics.

 

[MisterMe]

RE: CS4 and non-intel G5s, issues?

Chatting with a friend recently, he was saying he's had nothing but issues with trying to run CS4 on a non-Intel G5. ...

....

All G5s are non-Intel. That is because the processor family was produced exclusively by IBM.

That said, you are to be commended for asking the question on this forum. To many people make purchasing decisions based on chats with "friends." As a rule of thumb, your friends tend to be no smarter than you.

 

[oogieboogiex]

All G5s are non-Intel. That is because the processor family was produced exclusively by IBM.

That said, you are to be commended for asking the question on this forum. To many people make purchasing decisions based on chats with "friends." As a rule of thumb, you friends tend to be no smarter than you.

I guess it would be more correct then to differentiate the non-intel as a G5, and the Intel as a Mac Pro? I must be used to G5 for all of them given the case design.

And as for the commendation, thanks. While he is a friend, he's also a colleague. He's the pre-press operator for a printer I used with my old company. Now I am doing pre-press and design at a different print shop, so I am trying to use his experience and marry it to those of a wider base. After all, it could be just his machine, or some aspect, such as his GPU, or whatever other drivers he is running.

I am not finding too much I can rely on... some issues with NVIDIA cards, some issues with PS only...

I am thinking it may just make sense to hold out and have the few people using CS4 back save to CS3 until CS5 makes it's appearance.

 

[Macky-Mac]

.....I am thinking it may just make sense to hold out and have the few people using CS4 back save to CS3 until CS5 makes it's appearance.

if CS4 is really the problem, I doubt that CS5 will be any better.....if Adobe didn't bother to make sure that CS4 was backwards compatible then it's unlikely that as we move further and further away from the G5 era that they'll bother with better backwards compatibility with CS5

That said, I have a friend running CS4 on a G5 iMac with no problems and another friend running CS4 on a G4 ibook (he says it's sometimes slow)

 

[oogieboogiex]

if CS4 is really the problem, I doubt that CS5 will be any better.....if Adobe didn't bother to make sure that CS4 was backwards compatible then it's unlikely that as we move further and further away from the G5 era that they'll bother with better backwards compatibility with CS5

That said, I have a friend running CS4 on a G5 iMac with no problems and another friend running CS4 on a G4 ibook (he says it's sometimes slow)

You are correct. That was not my line of thinking really... it was more along the lines of skipping over CS4 until CS5 arrives, the company would postpone having to outlay for new machines, which is going to be inevitable at some point anyway... ie, CS5 will likely force new Mac Pros to be purchased, and so we can avoid spending on CS4...

one of my colleagues is still working on a MDD G4 and using CS2, so we know new machines are coming anyway... more I am gathering info on what the best scenario is...

spend on CS4 for 3 machines, and purchase a Mac Pro to replace the MDD, or
skip CS4 if it is buggy/a problem, get by with CS3 which we have done quite well so far, and then spend on 3 new Mac Pros and 3 copies of CS5 when CS5 debuts

it would seem CS4 is not really an issue though... so now it will be seeing what I can find out about when CS5 is coming...

 

[dllavaneras]

Here at work we've been discussing possibly upgrading from CS3.

Is there any compelling reason for you to upgrade to CS4?

 

[oogieboogiex]

Is there any compelling reason for you to upgrade to CS4?

we are a print company... we do design work, however we also pre-press supplied files, and sometimes we need to perform edits...

some clients have migrated to CS4... from a customer service standpoint, having CS4 would make things easier on them, because they won't need to backsave to CS3

it's a reason... not necessarily compelling... it has to be balanced against will it cause downtime, will it interrupt workflow, is it an expenditure we can forego...

for example, we know some clients will move to Quark 8, but we have only 1 copy of Quark 7 and won't likely move to Quark 8...
we also do not have any copies of Publisher because it simply isn't worth the expense or training for the few files we get...

Adobe CS however is kind of crucial... just a question now of determining what issues, if any, there are going to CS4...

 

[Hrududu]

I don't know if this helps at all, but years back when I was running Photoshop 7 on a Powermac G3, I was having problems with lots of crashes and kernel panics when I would do any sort of more intensive work like applying blurs and whatnot. The machine worked fine at all other times for many months. Eventually things got worse and I discovered some bad RAM in the machine. Your friend may want to re-install CS4, and then check out the RAM in the computer to see if thats contributing to his issues. Seems like most everyone else has run CS4 on the G5 without a hitch.

 

[Bennieboy©]

it should work fine, my sisters got cs4 photoshop running on her emac G4 with 1 gig of ram,