Photoshop CS2
In the case of Photoshop CS2, there's good news and bad. The bad news is that Photoshop running under Rosetta's emulation technology performs at about half the speed of a dual 2 GHz G5 desktop system, which, in turn, runs at about half the speed of a top-end G5 Quad desktop. The good news is that, in day to day operation, the effects of this slowdown won't be terribly noticeable in many cases. For example, if a Gaussian Blur filter takes one-sixteenth of a second to render on a G5, it takes one-eighth of a second to render on a MacBook Pro. Certainly nothing you'd notice in your daily workflow. In the case of filters and image adjustments, the slowdown only becomes noticeable when taken in cumulatively, as we'll get to below.
But there is one area where the slowdown is immediately apparent, and that is in transformations--rotating a canvas, rotating a layer, resizing, etc. Here you will see the unfamiliar progress bars indicating that the kind of number crunching that goes into transformations may be a bit much for Rosetta's "translation" to handle efficiently.
Here are the numbers. Explanations follow.
Test 1 involved the creation of a 4,000 x 4,000-pixel document, the application of a few filters and several transformations, including rotating layers and rotating the canvas. This test included 28 individual filters plus 19 image adjustments, transformations and various other functions. That's 47 commands applied in sequence in a single action. On the MacBook Pro, those functions averaged out to slightly more than two seconds each--not terrible considering the size of the image to which they were applied, but certainly not nearly as good as the other machines for which we have benchmarks for these tests.
Test 2 involved the creation of a 2,000 x 1,500-pixel document and more transformations than the first test. This was the most intensive of the tests for the MacBook, with each transformation taking a considerably more time than any other machine tested. There were 30 total commands in this test, with an average time of almost nine seconds per command.
Test 3 included the application of every single filter that ships with Photoshop CS2, with the exception of Displace. It also included a few transformations, text manipulation, selections and fills. The image size for this test was 800 x 600 pixels. There were 123 total commands in this test, averaging about 0.6 seconds per command on the MacBook Pro. This filter-heavy test shows that the MacBook can operate at reasonable speeds in Photoshop, as long as there aren't too many complex transformations involved.
