Hi there... a question about proc usage

[pixelpie]

Hi everyone. I'm a bit out of the loop in the processor world, so need a bit of advice. I have a new machine with an i7 Intel processor. I am running Win7 64bit. When running Photoshop (x64) or Illustrator, and rendering something I notice from the task manager performance panel that the processor is only working to about 5 or 6 percent in Illustrator or 10 or 12 percent in Photoshop. Is there any way to make it work "harder"? I would rather have a faster render and put this processor to work! What am I missing here? Thanks in advance for your help.

[DMB2000uk]

What version of the CS suite are you running?

Is this under general working, or when applying complex filters etc?

What graphics card are you running, and is openGL rendering enabled on it?

Dan

[pixelpie]

Dan, it's CS4. The PS program is always using less than 15% proc it seems no matter what I am doing. I'm not sure about Open GL I will have to look into that one. Thanks.

[pixelpie]

Oops, the graphic card is ATI Radeon HD 4650.

[DMB2000uk]

I think unless you are working with massive documents and applying complex filters, you aren't really going to see that much more CPU use.

The 'problem' here is probably that the actions and things you are doing are limited in how well they scale across all the processors (i.e. they're all actions that have to be performed one after the other rather than at the same time). 12.5% overall CPU use is pretty much 1 core working at 100% (spread across all the 8 logical cores).

Instead of thinking parallel threaded processing (which would increase your total CPU usage) your only option for faster performance is to make your CPU run faster via overclocking (which will require a lot of reading up, and time to set up properly).

Dan

PS. Also, if OpenGL rendering is enabled, some of the more complex operations will be offloaded to the GPU which is more suited than the CPU for the specific work that's offloaded to it.

[Dizz01]

I run CS4 here on a i7 920 with a ATI 4850 and 12 gigs of ram. If you want some better performance, get more ram and go to Edit - Preferences - Performance and allocate more Ram to Photoshop, grab a Solid State drive and make it your scratch disk. Also check the "Enable 3d Acceleration" box.

[pixelpie]

Thanks for your help, guys. I have a bit better understanding now. The Open GL is already active, as with 3D rendering. I'm not sure if more ram would help. I have 6 Gigs and it uses a max of about 2.4 on the more complex processes. The renders are not super slow.. I can definitely live with it, but I was just curious about why the proc was not working harder. Now I think I understand a bit more, so thanks!