Is the iMac good enough to run After Effects and Photoshop CS3

Question

Level 2

154 points

Is the iMac good enough to run After Effects and Photoshop CS3

I am thinking to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 and After Effects CS3 but I am not sure whether my iMac will be good enough to run it. I have looked at the Adobe web site and not sure whether the graphic chip is good enough. The chip set is a GMA 950 on a 1.8 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo white iMac. I think it is good enough for Photoshop but not sure if it is good enough for After Effects. Photoshop also mentions something about requiring an OpenGL 1.4 capable graphics card; I do not really know what this means and whether my graphics chip on the mother board is good enough. Could anyone tell me if this graphics chip is good enough to run both of this software? With Photoshop it also mentions soothing about 16 bit video graphics, I think the iMac has 32 bit but not sure if this is case could anyone confirm this.
Thanks for any help

G3 Beige DT, Rev1, G4 500MHz, 768 MB, USB 2.0, 120GB drive, Radeon 9200,, Mac OS X (10.3.9), Sonet Tempo ATA133, Intel iMac Core 2 Duo 1.8 Ghz 2Gb OS10.4.10, iPod video 30GB

Posted on Oct 12, 2007 3:14 PM

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Answer 1

lclcv

Level 1

70 points

Oct 12, 2007 3:23 PM in response to John A

I use all CS3 applications professionally on my iMac with no hassle. I have three or four of the applications open at once and can move between them easily.

However, I just began working with very large images - about 500 MB each and I have upgraded to 4 MB RAM to cope with them. The redraw in PhotoShop and InDesign was pretty jerky and slow with only 2 MB. However that's purely a file size problem and not one to do with CS3 on the iMac.

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Answer 2

eaes

Level 1

0 points

Oct 13, 2007 6:22 PM in response to lclcv

in general the imac is perfectly fine for CS3, the key is to keep the efficiency as shown info panel at 100%. When it is <100% your going into swap space, which is a lot slower. I hazard a guess that 1/2 gig files may tax this beast, but typical files from a d200 (15.8 MB) or even a mark 3 (25.0 MB) will be perfectly fine on this system.

I have no clue about after effects.

Best

Eric

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Answer 3

dhupp

Level 1

8 points

Dec 31, 2007 5:36 AM in response to lclcv

I have recently switched to mac and find that my Photoshop CS2 runs slow on my Imac 2.16 GHz intel Core Duo with 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, My PC runs much faster and is about 4 years old, Does anyone have any suggestions.

Thanks,

Dane

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Answer 4

bbolin

Level 3

524 points

Dec 31, 2007 7:31 AM in response to dhupp

Upgrade to CS3, the version you are running is PowerPC specific and has to run under Rosetta on your current Mac (an emulation environment), any emulation is going to be slower. CS3 is Universal Binary and runs native on Intel based Macs, it will be much faster than your old PC or even more so than CS2 running in PPC emulation.

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Answer 5

Dec 31, 2007 1:55 PM in response to John A

John, just to clarify exactly which iMac you have. Looking at your sig it would be the 1.83 Core 2 duo with 2GB RAM and 64MB shared video RAM? I will say that the 2.16GHz CD2 iMacs can definitely run these Apps without any problems. However I'm not sure about your machine in particular.

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