Benchmark Results: Photoshop CS6
Finally, the crown jewel of our benchmark apps: Photoshop CS6.
Again, with no hardware-based support, Intel’s Core i5 puts in a remarkably fine showing, losing out only to our FX/Radeon HD 7970 configuration. But with GPU-based OpenGL enabled, we see performance increase by roughly 200% to 500%. Surprisingly, our A8/APU config turns in the best GPU-accelerated time, and we did not see the same sort of scaling expected when we moved to testing on the Radeon HD 7970.
Not unexpectedly, CMYK takes 10% to 20% longer to process than RGB, but otherwise, the response patterns are almost identical. Adobe’s first swing with OpenCL in Photoshop exhibits very clear scaling across our platforms. From the “low” of our mobile A8 APU to the best-of-breed FX/Radeon HD 7970, we see over a 2x gap, which, in our opinion, speaks fairly highly of the APU’s capabilities. When you can get 50% of the performance of a top-end card essentially for free, that’s a good deal. The desktop A8 APU lands smack between these two, making an even more persuasive case for budget buyers with plans to use this application.
When we step up the blur load to 300, we see CMYK suddenly finishing much faster—go figure. Nevertheless, the scaling pattern remains similar, although we’re now approaching a 200% difference between low- and high-end with GPU-accelerated OpenCL enabled. Moreover, check out how much more benefit GPU acceleration delivers across the board compared to running in software with the workload increase to 300—up to a 15x benefit in our A8/Radeon HD 7970 configuration.
