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jdl8422

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 5, 2006
491
0
Louisiana
I have a mac pro with 7GB of RAM installed. When I go to performance under the settings it says that available RAM is 3GB and the ideal range is 70% of that. Why isnt it 7GB of available RAM? Thanks
 
mac photoshop is 32 bit so will never see more than 4GB (usually 3GB) until it moves to (optional) 64bit like on windows
 
I have CS4 on my new iMac and it only shows 3GB of RAM, I have 4GB of RAM and ideal range is 70%, I have bumped that upto 85%. Not played with it enough to see if it had any adverse effects yet though.

Like everyone has said it is due to 32bit CS4 on MAC, will have to wait until CS5 for it to take full advantage of RAM.
 
so its pointless to upgrade RAM for photoshop?

Not pointless. The point of having more RAM than PS can use is to have some RAM left over for other programs. With 7GB, you'll easily be able to run PS and still have lots of memory for everything else you might be doing (Bridge, AI, ID, DW, Safari, iTunes, etc).
 
You can make the RAM into a RAM disk and use it for scratch, not as fast as direct access to RAM, but easy to set up in OSX.
 
Not pointless. The point of having more RAM than PS can use is to have some RAM left over for other programs. With 7GB, you'll easily be able to run PS and still have lots of memory for everything else you might be doing (Bridge, AI, ID, DW, Safari, iTunes, etc).
At times Ill be running Photoshop CS4, After Effects , Illustrator and Bridge so 16GB on my system survives. However I wouldnt chance it with tight deadlines. I guess I got a bit gun-shy with the CS3 suite killing my system at times :p
 
so its pointless to upgrade RAM for photoshop? Is this fixed in CS4?

No, Do the upgrade. Mac OS X will find plenty of uses for the extra RAM. Just look at Activity Monitor while you are running Photoshop. I bet there are a dozen other processes running at the same time as Photoshop. All of those can use RAM too.

In addition the OS will use any extra RAM as a disk cache.
 
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