Custom brushes slow down CS4

[Twoja...@adobeforums.com]

Whenever I try to use a brush, the program slows down to a crawl. For instance: I open a 600 x 450 JPG and load a size 175 brush. Everything is fine until I increase the brush size. 175 - 900 is OK, but then the brush tip starts to lag like all hell. Reducing the brush size doesn't help. Apparently the problem also depends on the image size. When I load the same brush and a 1440 x 900 JPG, the lagging kicks in earlier. I tried changing the performance settings, but to no avail.

I'm using CS4 11.01 and Windows XP SP3.

[dave_...@adobeforums.com]

got the latest video card drivers? what card do you have? what vers. drivers? open gl options on or off?

[Twoja...@adobeforums.com]

I have Radeon HD4850 with the latest Catalyst drivers. Turning OpenGL on and off doesn't change anything.

[David_E_...@adobeforums.com]

Try the usual .net update, directx 9c, 2008 C++ update.

[Twoja...@adobeforums.com]

Did that, didn't help.

[David_E_...@adobeforums.com]

How much ram and are you running 32 or 64 bit XP? Scratch disk area on the same hard drive? Try doing a defrag on your hard drive?

[Twoja...@adobeforums.com]

32-bit. Scratch disk is the same one I installed the program on. I defrag quite often.

[David_E_...@adobeforums.com]

How much ram is installed? Your 4850: is it a x2, 1gig, or 512 meg card? If you only have 2 gigs of ram installed your not leaving much left over for the remaining hardware, xp, and photoshop. Go to start and type in msconfig and see if you can turn off any software that starts up that you don't use or can start up yourself. This will free up some address space. If you can get another seperate hard drive for the scratch disk. This will keep your hard drive from thrashing. Hard drives are pretty cheap and so is ram.

[Twoja...@adobeforums.com]

I have 2GB's or RAM and the Radeon has 512. I can't see how a graphics editing program can require more than that when I'm working with a single small file and merely trying to paint a simple pattern with a brush... It's not like I'm trying to simultaneously open ten high res images or something.

Besides, this page

<http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/systemreqs/>

tells me I'm easily meeting the requirements.