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Adobe's Creative Suite 3 marks the single biggest software release in the company's history. But the gains it offers over its predecessor aren't so big.
The CS3 offering is now divided into two almost indistinguishable bundles, one targeting print content (Adobe CS3 Design Premium, $1,799) and the other Web content (Adobe CS3 Web Premium, $1,599). With the exception of Fireworks and Contribute, Adobe includes the same core design, productivity and workflow tools in both suites: InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash and Dreamweaver (the latter two aren't included in the Standard Edition).
After examining the suites, the CRN Test Center found marginal improvements on some development tools and were disappointed by the performance of its major design tools, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Photoshop worked well on an Intel quad-core system with 2 Gbytes of memory. Files were rendered on fast 300-Gbyte SAS hard drives working through an Adaptec RAID card. The test system had an Nvidia GeForce 8 SLI series graphics card.
Compared with Photoshop CS2, CS3 performed only marginally better. What's more, older PCs that performed poorly with CS2 will continue to suffer from performance degradation with CS3. Photoshop has always been...