ISO50

A senior Project Manager at Adobe (John Nack) has announced on his blog that Photoshop CS4 will in fact be available as a  64-bit version on the Windows Platform.  What does this mean? The ability to reference all of your installed memory for one, that is assuming you are running a 64 bit flavor of Windows. Nack quoted that overall performance would increase around 8-12%. I would have to imagine that would get higher when working with very large files and a very large amount of RAM. You could theoretically have all of your temp data reside in RAM and never touch a physical swap drive. Above is a leaked screen-shot of CS4 which I’ve included simply to have a graphic for this post. I can’t vouch for it’s authenticity. (source) I have to say though, that looks just like CS3 and from what I remember from my time at Adobe, when I walked by the PS development area and saw some of the interfaces they were working on, they looked a lot different than this. Although this could just be an un-skinned development version, or it could be complete BS. During a search for this image I also ran across some articles stating that the program itself has been leaked onto the internets.

Here’s the scoop from the original source, John Nack’s blog.

So here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: OS X will not be getting 64 bit Photoshop. Crazy! As I have continually tested the speed of my OS X machine versus that of Windows XP using Photoshop, XP wins handily each time. This new development could widen that gap even further. But at the end of the day, OS X is light years beyond XP in terms of user experience and stability so I want to stick with it. But once CS4 comes out, if the speed tests are better by a significant margin I might have to make the switch back, because really, it’s all about raw performance when you’re trying to crank through the big files.

More on this as it develops.