[orangepeel]

Photoshop sheds 32-bit husk
Advantage: Windows
By Paul Taylor: Thursday, 03 April 2008, 5:18 PM


FOR ALL ITS professional pedigree, Photoshop hasn’t overcome one of its main limitations: the 32-bit RAM limit. Current Photoshop (and any 32-bit applications in general) can only address 4GB of RAM in Windows (and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 64-bit Vista/XP), and amazingly, a lowly 2GB in OS X.

Yes. OS X limits RAM use on a single application to 2GB.

Pixel-picking on hi-res images can become quite slow when you’re working gigapixel art and run out of physical RAM, and then Photoshop automatically starts pumping out data to the hard-drive virtual memory.


Continues...

[silkstone]

I'd always thought that Windows (even 64-bit versions) limits the RAM available to individual apps to 2GB, the same as OS-X, and that the rest is used by the system. 32-bit Windows can only address about 3.2GB total. Tell me if I'm wrong here! Anyway, 2GB should be enough for photographic applications unless you're producing a 300dpi mural.

[Boofers]

Good one OP, I really like reading this kind of info bashing ,,. Just glad my Mac works for now,,,never know where I'll go later when it retires..thanks for the link..

[VikingPhotography]

Originally Posted by silkstone

I'd always thought that Windows (even 64-bit versions) limits the RAM available to individual apps to 2GB

32-bit versions, yes... not so with 64-bit Windows (either Vista or XP64)

I'm running vista with 4GB of RAM on my board and I have 2.5GB allocated to Photoshop. I'm seriously thinking of switching up to 8GB of memory since prices are so darn low at the moment. It won't drastically increase speed on a per file basis, but batch processes will run a bit more smoothly