Paint Shop Pro X4

[SyncroScales]

Just wondering if this program is 64 bit or not.

[LeviFiction]

NO.

[df]

Does it address more than 2gb of RAM? Make use of multiple processors?

[teknisyan]

That's a good question... let me ring some of the tech people and I'll update this post.

But about the use of multiple processor, are you referirng to the dual-core or quad core processors? Because if you set the processor affinity of PSP X4, you can actually set PSP X4 to use all processor. Here's how it looks like on my end.

I'm using a quad-core i5 process.

affinity.jpg (27.19 KiB) Viewed 3769 times

But I can be wrong.

[SyncroScales]

Can this setting be done in X3 Ultimate? That's the version I recently bought.

Are there any settings I can tweak for X3? Will this setting in any version hinder Windows or other programs functioning?

Is X3 designed for multi-core usage? dual or quad or more?

Thanks for the reply.

[Simone Corel UK]

@SyncroScales »

Settings in Task Manager have nothing to do with a program, but only Windows. If your Windows allows programs to use several processors, then programs will use them.

This can even be done with Animation Shop, the old JASC program.

[SyncroScales]

Oh.

Thats what that is. I always change the proirity for my programs to high., now I know what the other one is.

Does this have something to do with threads?

Would all my programs have the capacity to do this? I don't want to check everything. Is that what you mean by it's a Windows thing? Which Windows or OS won't let it happen?

[LeviFiction]

Windows has had this ability since, I believe, Windows NT so it's been around for a while. All OSs have the ability to use Processor Affinity though Mac OSX (last I knew anyway) only exposes an API for it so you'd need third-party software to set the processor affinity.

It has something to do with threads to a small degree but it has more to do with how threads are assigned to processor cores. Each program is its own thread and if they in turn utilize multi-threading they can make use of more processors. Usually Windows will handle the switching and assigning of cores manually. So when programs are first loaded they are pre-assigned an affinity and if Windows deams it more efficient to use an idle processor for two programs competing for the same affinity it'll do the switch automatically. Setting the Processor affinity tells Windows to associate the program with specific cores only. Which is handy if you knew that one core tended to remain idle on your system as a program could have a CPU core all to itself for a little bit.

That being said...all of my processes are set to an affinity of all processors automatically. And, I could be mistaken here, I don't believe PSP is threaded enough in its graphical processes that it actually makes use of all cores. So the processr affinity of all cores simply means that Windows can switch PSP to any core when it feels it needs to without any actual benefit. But like I said I could be wrong.

[flagpole]

from what i can tell PSP itself is multithreaded but a lot of it's functions are not.

the skin smoothing filter for example is multithreaded. which is good because it is very cpu intensive.
the jpeg artefact removal filter though is not. which is shame.

you can tell trivially by looking at the cpu utilization even without looking at the individual cores, whilst applying these filters on my amd quad applying the jpeg artefact filter to a large image shows the psp exe using 25.5% cpu, 25 being the one core applying the filter and the other .5% being PSP itself. where as skin smoothing uses 90%+
(intel cpus may have half as many cores as they appear to because of hyper threading)

but multithreading these things is hard it's good that they've made a start, but i'd like to see more.

incipiently changing the cpu affinity away from letting windows manage it itself is pretty much always going to degrade performance.