3d Menu Greyed Out

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

I have Adobe CS4 Extended, and I've been trying to use the 3d features ever since I watched John Nack demo it over on pixel perfect. But for me, the entire 3d menu is greyed out. I have enable GPU acceleration, but in order for it to work, I had to download the patch to allow older GPU's. My current graphics card is an Nvidia 8400GS. Nothing special, but it does all of the other GPU accelerated stuff such as rotation and zooming fine, so I'm puzzled as to why 3d wont work.

Any help would me much appreciated

-Nik

[Donald...@adobeforums.com]

Just a guess, but does it only work with 8 bit files perhaps?

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

Good guess, but all the images I'm using are 8-bit RGB.

-Nik

[Steve Sprengel]

My 3D menu is the same when I edit a JPG or other 2D image. I believe you have to have a 3D object loaded for any of the 3D menu items to apply and hence they ae greyed out.

[Steve Sprengel]

I watched John Nack's 3D features demo and agree that a 2D image should have a few options available for it, so my initial response was wrong. I will have to research things on my machine.

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

That's what I thought at first, but yeah, John Nack did it, why cant we? He must have magic powers.

But yeah, any research you can do would be much appreciated. Is the 3d menu available when you edit a 3d file?

[Steve Sprengel]

I installed CS4 Extended Trial on my work laptop and some 3D menu options are available, the ones that John Nack used, like the Postcard and Spherical Panorama options.

My work laptop has 1.5GB of memory and the 3D options work, albiet slowly.

My home desktop is quite old, but has a newer graphics card that works with the various GPU-enhanced options; however, it only has 1.0 GB of memory on the motherboard so perhaps there is a memory threshold.

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

You may be right. My machine only has 512MB of memory. I'll see if I can find any info on this.

[Steve Sprengel]

Ok, I got 3D to be enabled on my home computer by resetting the preferences -- using Ctrl-Alt-Shift before the splash screen shows up. I had upgraded my video-card in between installing CS4 and trying 3D and something must have been saved from earlier that said I could not run 3D on the old card. Nothing changed with the OpenGL settings before or after the reset and I don't know as I updated anything else in preferences, so the video-driver update was probably what was different. Adobe suggests turning off OpenGL, reseting the preferences and updaing the video card drivers then renabling OpenGL. I had done everything except reset the preferences.

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

Alright. I tried resetting the preferences. Then I downloaded the latest nvidia drivers and installed them and rebooted. Then I cleared the preferences again. Still no luck.

Any more suggestions. Can anyone else with an 8400GS verify that 3d works for them?

[Steve Sprengel]

If you didn't reset your preferences after installing the video driver you might try that; otherwise, I don't have any other suggestions, other than to buy more memory if you can.

Besides someone verifying that basic 3D operations work with an 8400GS, another thing would be to verify that the basic 3D menu items are enabled with only 512MB.

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

I haven't been able to find much, but I did find someone who claimed that everything was working for them and they had a 8400GS.

Is anyone from Adobe able to pitch in?

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

* bump. Someone please help. This should be relatively straight forward. You haven't tested the 8400GS with CS4, but does that mean that it wont work? And I have 512MB of RAM, does this prohibit me from using 3d functions?

Thanks

[David_E_...@adobeforums.com]

The 8400GS has 256 megs of Ram on it correct? So if your laptop only has 512 Megs of ram, the first 256 of address space is used for the card. That only leaves 256 address space for the operating system. That means the majority of the operating system is running in virtual memory on your hard drive. Plus other software and not even to mention CS4 extended running in virtual memory. Your hard drive is thrashing around like there is no tomorrow trying to keep up with demand. You need to invest in ram in order for even the laptop to run correctly without considering CS4.

[John Joslin]

Strange mathematics!

[Steve Sprengel]

A video card can share some system ram but it is not necessarily equal to the card's memory. For example, I have a 1G system with a 512MB card and they share 256MB, which is the maximum "AGP Aperture" I can configure in the motherboard BIOS. This leaves the MB with 768K unshared memory and the video card with 768M total memory including what is shared.

I agree that getting more RAM is the right thing to try, next...unless the RAM is expensive, then just upgrade to a whole new computer.

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

Yeah, I get this. I should get more RAM. I should get a new PC. RAM is cheap at the moment, but my computer is pretty old and I don't really see the point in spending money on SDRAM (which is the only thing my pc can use) when when I eventually upgrade it'll be unusable.

But my question still hasn't really been answered. Is there any concrete evidence that suggests that the 3d menu is for some reason disabled if you don't have much RAM installed? Premiere for example wants 1GB of memory. I only have 512MB, and it runs slow as hell, but I can still use it and all its features - I just have to come back in half an hour if I want to do something computationally intensive. I know that's more related to my CPU, but can you see what I'm saying. I could get more RAM, but why bother when I should - as far as anyone can tell - be able to do these things.

[steve_g...@adobeforums.com]

Hi,

Something to check. In the Ps> Preferences> Performance, what is the Memory Usage value? The 3D menu will disable when RAM is allocated too low on minimum 512MB RAM systems. You may also need to remove the "AllowOldGPU" registry key.

I have an older laptop that doesn't support OpenGL drawing features but it can do some basic Ps 3D if the RAM usage is set higher than 450MB.

[Nik...@adobeforums.com]

Ok, thanks for that. That answers my question. I can't give photoshop more than about 274MB or RAM, but this is just due to other processes running in the background.

Thank you so much for finally solving this problem

Regards

-Nik

[Steve Sprengel]

On my 1GB Vista 32 system, 3D fails for 307MB but works for 314MB allocated to Photoshop where my available RAM is 703MB in the Photoshop Performance Preferences panel.

So a suggestion would be to end all unnecessary processes and see if you can get enough memory for it to work. To test you at least need to use File / New to create a blank document.