Photoshop CS4: 64-bit-ready

Adobe announced their plans to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only.

"In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only," says John Nack from Adobe.

Adobe has been taking prompt, pragmatic steps to enable 64-bit Photoshop as quickly as possible on both Mac and Windows. 64-bit computing lets an application address very large amounts of memory, specifically, more than 4 gigabytes. This is great for pro photographers with large collections of high-res images, being able to address more RAM means less time swapping images into and out of memory during image processing-intensive operations.

Still, "64-bit applications don't magically get faster access to memory, or any of the other key things that would help most applications perform better," warns Photoshop architect Scott Byer.

On one hand Adobe is breaking new ground with Photoshop, and when processing very large files on a suitably equipped machine, Photoshop x64 realizes some big performance gains. For example, opening a 3.75 gigapixel image on a 4-core machine with 32GB RAM is about 10x faster. On the other hand, the company works very hard at maintaining parity across platforms.

All "older" Mac applications such as Photoshop, After Effects and even Apple's Final Cut Pro and iTunes are developed on the Carbon framework. Last year Apple canceled the 64-bit roadmap for Carbon and now only applications built on the newer Cocoa framework will be able to be 64-bit-enabled, even though Steve Jobs said "You can have fully native 64-bit UI Carbon or Cocoa applications" only one year earlier.

Adobe promised they will enable 64-bit Photoshop for Mac as well, but not in CS4.

Comments

Be the first to write a comment

You must me logged in to write a comment.