The best way to measure performance is by using real programs. The problem, though, is creating a methodology using real software that provides accurate results. For Photoshop CS2 there is a methodology created by the folks at GamingHeaven that is very accurate. Their script applies a series of 12 filters to a sample image and we wrote down the time taken for each filter to run. At the end, we have the results for each individual filter and we simply added them up to give the total time taken to run the 12 filters from GamingHeaven batch. The results below are given in seconds, so the lower the number the better.

Photoshop CS2 doesn’t seem to take advantage of having more than two CPUs (i.e., more than two cores) on your system, as the CPU with the highest clock rate achieved the best results: Core 2 Extreme X6800 was 3.01% faster than Core 2 Extreme QX6700 – not a big difference, though. Core 2 Extreme QX6700 achieved the same performance level as Core 2 Duo E6700, as they run under the same clock rate. The reviewed CPU was 27.05% faster than Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 32.88% faster than Pentium 4 3.4 GHz and 36.90% faster than Pentium 4 3.2 GHz.