Briefly: Apple's Leopard to boost Photoshop performance

In an forum post made a few weeks ago, Adobe's Russell Williams explained how the integration of Photoshop with Leopard, due out a bit later this spring, will overcome an existing barrier to performance in the current version of the Mac OS X.

"Buffering is disabled by default in CS3 (Creative Suite 3) when running on Tiger because of an OS issue. Every 30 seconds, the OS pauses Photoshop for anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds as it manages that giant buffer cache," he wrote.

"If you're painting, this is a big problem, and it's why we made the 'disable VM buffering' plugin available for CS2. Apple says that issue is fixed in Leopard, but we haven't verified that yet."

In his post, Williams said Adobe's current plan for Photoshop CS3 is to enable VM buffering for big RAM machines running Leopard and disable it for Tiger.

"But we'll provide an 'enable VM buffering' plugin to override this on Tiger if you don't mind the Tiger pause," he added.