Benchmark Results: Adobe's Creative Suite
Shorter run times mean better performance, and Adobe Photoshop appears to enjoy a small boost from the switch to Windows 8. And, as we saw in DiRT Showdown, the FX patches can actually send performance back the other way compared to the automatic updates installed through August of this year.
After Effects has demonstrated light threading in the past, so we might expect to see the Core Parking hotfix help performance a little bit if Windows 7 was bouncing that one thread around AMD's FX-8150. But we certainly didn't think we'd see the updates hurt performance.
Creating a PDF out of a PowerPoint presentation is also a single-threaded task, so it's interesting to see Windows 7 with the FX-optimized patches and Windows 8 do better than a standard Windows 7 install, which is the opposite of how After Effects behaved.
Windows 8 falls slightly behind in Premiere, but the difference is so small that we're not prepared to call any of the three configurations better than the others. This workload is very well-threaded, leaving little room for a scheduler- or idle resource-oriented speed-up.
