Adobe announce a 64-bit version of Photoshop
Adobe have announced their intention of shipping a 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4 for Windows (Vista 64).
Mac users will have to wait till CS5 because Apple dropped support for 64-bit Carbon technology and have decided instead to support only 64-bit Cocoa technology in the future, which means Adobe will have to scrap the work they have done so far on porting Photoshop to 64-bit on the Mac and start all over again.
All is not what it seems at first sight because 64-bit support is not a magic bullet. The speed gain is only in the region of 8-12% according to tests done by Adobe.
While Windows (Vista 64) will be able to “allocate” more than 4GB of RAM to Photoshop natively, Mac users can already take advantage of 4GB+ memory: if more than 4GB RAM is present, Mac OS uses it to cache the scratch disk read and writes in unused RAM.
You can read more about the announcement on John Nack’s blog.
You can read more about the cons and pros of a 64-bit version of Photoshop on Scott Byer’s blog.
Comment
, Leave a Reply