B2EVO

Ok. As unprofessional it may sound it represents the best the problems I encountered in Photoshop CS4.
First of all I should explain the problem.
I have installed on my system the entire Adobe Creative Suite 4. My system consists in:
WinXP Professional 32bit with SP3 installed
2Gb RAM
Ati HD3870 – drivers up to date
Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz)
And more than 13Gb free space on system’s partition on which Ps CS4 is installed.

The Photoshop CS4 lag was experienced when I excessively used the Brush and/or Clone Stamp tool(s) and consists in a delay in executing the respective command (sometimes up to 2 seconds – depending on how much I use one of the previously mentioned tools). I was surprised and still am that Adobe left this issue (bug) on the final release.

That said I started to look for a resolution like always using… google. The solution was lingering to appear. In fact there were only ambiguous answers, none that could provide a proper explanation also a solution to the problem. Therefore I thought that it would be for the best to gather all of them in one place.

Solution 1
- (could be) to increase the amount of space allocated on a specific hard disk partition the Scratch Disk option in Ps CS4. This can be done via Edit -> Preferences -> Performance. :: see image below ::
In my case didn’t work at all.

Solution 2
- (could be) to upgrade my/your computer. This alternative, let’s be honest is quite expensive, especially in these harsh times.
This solution wasn’t for me and my budget.

Solution 3
This one is the best I could find. On top of that it worked for me.
Same steps like in Solution 1: Edit -> Preferences -> Performance and look for the Enable OpenGL Drawing option and if it’s available tick the check box next to it. That thing done it should activate the button Advanced Settings. Click the button and a new window like the one in the image below will open.
First, disable the Vertical Sync. In most of the cases that should do the trick. If not, proceed to the next level and disable the Advanced Drawing option.
As you can see in my case I had to disable both Vertical Sync and Advanced Drawing options and to be safe or simply because I was so damn tired, I also disabled the Force Bilinear Interpolation option.
One little specification – when I was experiencing the lag this option was not yet activated.

Solution 4
Perform an Adobe Update. This can be done with ease via Help -> Updates inside any CS4 program.
Hope that it will work. I’m not ready to do any updates yet.

Solution 5
You can always do a downgrade and return to CS3 which among other things and bugs doesn’t share this “minor” one.
In this case I rather turn to MS Paint than go back to CS3. You all remember what happened when I tried to uninstall it.