How well can a G5 run CS4?

[Hammertime]

Hey folks,
Dual 1.8Ghz Power Mac G5
1.25GB DDR
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB DDR SDRAM;


I've been wanting to get into movie editing, so I picked up a pretty cheap G5 to run Final Cut Pro. I've been doing some pretty simple editing thus far, and it runs great.

But then I boot up the CS4 trial to see how well it works, and I notice its almost unusable its so laggy. I know it is hard to quantify this, but how well will CS4 run if I upgrade my RAM to, say, 3GB?

I don't mind buying more RAM if it will run adequately, but if not, I can flip this G5 and use the RAM money to get a refurb iMac, for not much more...

So anyone have a G5 with better specs and have an opinion on CS4 performance?

Thanks in advance!

 

[TheSandman2236]

Bump -- I'd also like to know

 

[AMDXP]

Should run it fine, but your GPU is weak.

I don't think that hampers photoshop a lot though...

 

[tennisballs]

Well enough

 

[slugg]

Just know that you won't benefit from GPU acceleration in Adobe CS4 with that video card. Well, at least it isn't officially supported by Adobe. Source: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb405711&sliceId=2#mac

 

[Hammertime]

Thanks guy. I'll be adding 2GB of ram, as well as a new GPU. Thanks for the input!

 

[Deimos]

Our campus is upgrading to CS4 sometime this year and I know that the guy in charge of IT says that 2GB is pretty much required, but I have spoken to a couple of other guys around campus and they have mentioned that the next major OSX release will drop support of PPC all together, I'm just thinking, if that is the case, why would CS4 not be optimised to only run on Intel based macs? I don't think Adobe would waste rescources optimising for old hardware if it won't be supported anymore, you might want to check that out before upgrading Video card or RAM.

 

[DeChache]

The G5 is still a beast (Its no Intel Mac but). But you do want at least 2 gigs of ram. The video card I wouldn't worry to much I have windows machines that are using the workstation version of your card and everything works just fine. But it eats ram like no other. Granted I'm supporting windows but we are making a move to Macs so I'm learning slowly.

 

[dr.stevil]

IMHO, don't bother.

CS4, even with a top notch processor/GPU runs very laggy IMO. Stick with CS3 or lower for now (they may have fixed it in a patch, but last time I gave it a try, it paled in comparison to CS3)

 

[Morazl]

I just uninstalled all my Adobe products because they're not stable and it can get laggy. See system specs...