Photoshop CS6 13.0.2 HiDPI Update: Faster Than Before by 13%

See the discussion of screen scaling and actual pixels.

I wondered: would the new HiDPI (Retina display) support cause a change in performance? My concern was that things could become slower with Photoshop pushing around more pixels.

It turns out that sometimes you get a freebie:

Photoshop CS6 13.0.2 is now about 13% faster on the MacBook Pro with Retina display.

I don’t know if performance is better on other machines, or just with the MBP Retina. Presumably nothing changes on other machines, but it’s possible that some other general improvement has been made.

See also Optimizing Photoshop CS6.

Results below using the diglloydSpeed1 benchmark.

Fastest performance: OpenGL disabled with Photoshop CS6 13.0.2 update

Common tasks faster this way

Open GL

Disabling OpenGL (graphics acceleration) is provably slightly faster for common tasks than leaving it enabled.

This is nothing new.