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.

 

Overall CS3 slightly outperformed CS4, but only by a small margin. For the Web Photo Gallery, CS4 was slightly faster but only by about 1%.

Testing Environment

So how scientific were these tests? They were performed on a clean install of OS X 10.5.6 on a MacBook Pro 2.33 with 4GB of RAM and an Intel X-25 SSD. The performance settings were identical. For the Retouch Artists test, I set the history to 20 to represent more real-world testing. No system changes or updates were installed. No changes to CS3 nor CS4 were made after testing started. Each test was run after a complete system reboot, and each test was run multiple times. The results above were the average of the tests. The test results were all very consistent.