CS4 acts strangely

[caligula]

I downloaded a 30 day trial of CS4. Prior to that I was using CS3. I am finding that it exhibits some strange behavior like sometimes, but not all the time, when I am changing the opacity of a layer parts of the image will shake and show a bare checkerboard pattern as if there is nothing on part of the image temporarily. I can't imagine the purpose of this behavior and is there a way to turn it off? It makes doing precise retouching that much more difficult. Bare patches shouldn't flash as there are many layers behind the current one that are filled with pixels.


Also sometimes photoshop kind of gets temporarily stuck like I can't move to a different layer or change from the layers palette to the history palette or do anything to the image for a minute or so. I don't however see a spinning gear. There is plenty of ram on this computer which is a dual processor 3.2 GHz quad mac.

Is this a case of corrupted preferences?

[Old Geezer]

Have you got Open GL ticked in the GPU settings ?
( Edit - Preferences - Performance - Enable OpenGL Drawing )

[caligula]

It seems to work a little better now that I updated to 11.01, but the problem persists when using the gradient tool when open GL is checked.

I guess there is something wrong with my video card.
The video card on this mac is a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.

What is open GL anyway?

[Old Geezer]

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform) API (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface) for writing applications that produce 2D (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D_computer_graphics) and 3D computer graphics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics).

Don't ask me what the hell that lot means, I just found it on the web.:)

Your card should be man enough for the job. Try downloading latest drivers for it.

[caligula]

The latest drivers for the video cards are supposedly included in all updates to the OS and I am current with my updates.

Photoshop CS4 works ok if I turn off open GL drawing. Otherwise the screen now flashes a bare checkerboard background all the time even if I have just opened an image and done nothing to it.


These are the specs on the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Type: Display
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0602
Revision ID: 0x00a2
ROM Revision: 3233

[caligula]

When I brought the computer in for testing they told me that the problem most likely lies with the Apple OS which is not able to keep up with CS4 when open GL is enabled. They told me that with each update to the OS the problem might be fixed. Also as I am using a trial version of CS4 and there might be some sort of glitch withi it.

I opted not to pay for testing as my computer had already passed the extended hardware test included with the mac install DVD.

My question is are other mac OS10.5.7 users having trouble running CS4 when open GL is enabled?