Speed test results: Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) vs. 4 (CS4)

When CS3 was released there were some noticeable speed hits. Some of those were due to new features. The general response to CS4 has not been very exciting. The handful of new features Adobe is advertising aren’t exciting many users. Some are weary of upgrading, and if past performance hits hold true for CS4, many will end up waiting for CS5.

There have been a handful of performance comparisons between CS3 and CS4. However, I have not seen much that is both scientific and real world. So I set out to grab a few numbers to quantify any performance differences in a scientific comparison.

For the tests, I chose a few core apps of the suite – InDesign, Illustrator and of course Photoshop. I ran a few extra tests on Photoshop as I know that will be important to many.

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