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Scott Rosenberg
11-Jul-2006, 13:34
hey fellas, i was under the impression that CS2 could use up to 4 gigs of RAM. well, i just upped my memory from 2 gigs to 4, but in CS2 when i goto:

edit-> preferences-> memory and image cache

the program still shows 1760mb as my available ram. under system info in windows, i see 3.37gb of RAM, but not in photoshop. my bios shows a full 4gigs, oddly enough.

is there something i need to do to get CS2 to 'see' the extra memory? i've read about the 3gig switch in the boot.ini, but have also heard that can cause lots of problems. since my bios and os is seeing more than CS2, i figured there might be some setting in the program that i need to play with.

i'm running XP Pro Service Pack 2 if that makes a difference.

thanks,
scott

Jeremy Moore
11-Jul-2006, 14:39
scott, i thought it was that photoshop could only use 2gigs of ram, but having 4 was good because you could allocate 2 gigs entirely to photoshop and then have 2 left over to run the rest of the system apps. i'm just talking about of my ass here (an amazing ability!), but this is what i remember being bandied about on various forums.

Ted Harris
11-Jul-2006, 14:45
CS 2 can see 3.5 gigs not 4. But your system and other memory buffers may take up a bit more than the 500MB not being used by CS2 ... not sure what is going on Scott.

Michael Graves
11-Jul-2006, 14:49
It can actually use 3GB, according to their own sources. Still, as long as your OS supports 4GB, you should able to allocate 3GB to photoshop and leave 1GB available for system files and/or other applications. I have 4.5GB installed in my Power PC. PS "sees" 3072MB. I allocate 99% of "available RAM" for PS and the system simply takes over the remaining RAM.

Tom Westbrook
11-Jul-2006, 14:50
I just did that 4GB upgrade, too. See http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx for info on windows memory usage and http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html for CS2.

Scott Rosenberg
11-Jul-2006, 17:22
I just did that 4GB upgrade, too. See http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx for info on windows memory usage and http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html for CS2.

tom, thanks for the links. when you goto edit-> preferences-> memory and image cache, what does CS2 show under 'Available RAM'?

Tom Westbrook
11-Jul-2006, 18:09
I can't get the /3GB switch to work on my system--instability happens (using cheap value RAM is the mostly likely cause). Currently I just get a max of 1761 MB as max available to CS2.

Scott Rosenberg
11-Jul-2006, 19:08
I can't get the /3GB switch to work on my system--instability happens (using cheap value RAM is the mostly likely cause). Currently I just get a max of 1761 MB as max available to CS2.

that's precisely what i've got available to allocate to the app with 4 gigs installed. you can bump the % way up with that much excess memory and also nudge the cache levels to 8.

thanks, all.

Scott Rosenberg
11-Jul-2006, 21:33
here are a couple of very good articles on optimizing photoshop...

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/332271.html
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/332271.html

scott

Jack Flesher
12-Jul-2006, 07:30
On my machine, adding the simple /3G to the end of the boot.ini string did the trick. However, some MB's need the option string which allows selection at boot (google "xp 3g switch" for details). Either way, you need to add one of the 3g switch options to XP SP2 to actually allow programs to see more than 2G ram.

Now, once that is done, XP will reserve the share of the total ram (4G in most cases) it needs for ALL of it's loaded I/O devices, regardless if they are used. This will include ALL attached drives, graphics cards, firewire and USB ports, etc. What is left is what is avaialble to programs and what you will see as available to PS in the memory and image cache dialog. This can vary from about 2.2G on a loaded up system to maybe 3.5G on a trim hardware system. FWIW I have 2.77 available to CS on my fairly heavily-loaded-with-hardware system.

The good news is you can assign 100% of that to photoshop as the OS has already reserved what it needs for its other resources.

The bad news is I really did not see any significant performace boost in CS over the basic 2G allocation even when working on very large Betterlight files.

The better news is that what I did notice is that I could print really big prints directly from Photoshop on my Epsons -- they no longer get cut off after 32 inches.

Cheers,

Kirk Gittings
12-Jul-2006, 08:18
Sorry guys, I am close to a complete idiot on some of this stuff. How do I actually go about doing this.

"adding the simple /3G to the end of the boot.ini string did the trick"

Thanks.

Scott Rosenberg
12-Jul-2006, 09:26
i found this on another forum...



In my experience it does not work for some regular 32bit XP installations either, you should use it with care since it could give you some nice bluescreen at startup (!).

Best prevention is to add the statement twice in the boot.ini - one time with and one time without the switch. So it'd look like this:
Code:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /3GB
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Two lines, one break only.
You may set one as the default in the system\startup and recovery settings. Once it fails, you'll have two options to choose between in the F8 boot menu.

edit: I guess it was XP service pack 1 it usually fails with. Dont quote me on that though.

jack, are you running SP2 or SP1?

Greg Miller
12-Jul-2006, 11:27
Even if you cannot allocate over 2gb to Photoshop you can still make very good use of the extra RAM to see a performance improvement.

Just get a RAM Disk utility (some free ones exist) and allocate 1 GB as a RAM DIsk. This will be assigned a letter just like a physical hard drive (e.g. "E:"(in the Windows world; not sure about MAC)). Then you can allocate your Photoshop Swap Disk to the RAM Disk. Now Photoshop will be swapping out data to RAM instead of a physical hard drive. This should provide peformance very similar to allocating 3 GB to Photoshop. Having 3GB allocated tyo Photoshop would prevent swapping data. Using the RAM disk will mena Photoshop will have to swap data more often but it will be swapping to the same memory Photoshop would use if it was directly allocated.