Why Pentium 503

It makes quite a bit of difference for straight forward operations like applying a filter. The P4 is very good for this kind of operations because Netburst's kind of like a DSP :P

I doubt that is the case since the A64 is basically a 32bit K7 extended.

It takes 32 seconds for me on 1600x1200. Quite significant and disk IO would have nothing to do with an image that small since we both have several times more memory than needed for this.

It is quite strange why you cannot do the operations on A3 when you have 2GB versus my 1.5GB physical memory. The only explanation I can think of is the implementation in PS 5 and PS 8 is different wrt to memory usage i.e. PS8(CS) is more efficient in memory usage, which of course supports my point that CPU can be the bottleneck and not disk nor memory once you need to crunch through enough data.

This will explain why you don't get the not-responding messages. Mine's single core, non-HT.

3.3s for me

14s for mine after upsizing it. This is a bit strange tho, our first reversal.

I guess we need to define fast here. Fast to me is less than 3 seconds. Basically, I only consider it fast if I click, take a breath, blink and it's done. At A3 sizes, basically none of the filters are fast from my POV.

-- A Lost Angel, fallen from heaven Lost in dreams, Lost in aspirations, Lost to the world, Lost to myself