I have had and used Gimp on three different computers, each of which has also had Photoshop 5.0. One of the three 9(newest) is SMP PIII at 866mhz w/128mb ram, lots of swap space. The proportional speed between all three is similar with other programs speeds. The SMP screams compared to the others. Yes, photoshop is running on just 1cpu on that machine. Otherwise: Photoshop is several times faster than Gimp at most tasks, painfully slow on everything except the SMP system for most significant tasks as I work with 28mb files much of the time. Ram increases have only made marginal improvements, but CPU changes have been very proportional in change. I could do a lot more work with some more speed, and would love to see it come. My presumption is that the Gimp developers probably don't have as many man hours going into speed issues as Adobe did for Photoshop. That there is an open source program that competes so well on so many flanks with Photoshop, I'm thrilled and duly impressed. Being an ignoramus on what's really at the heart of these programs, I can only speak as a user, so please forgive me my ignorance of the challenges. I just know what would be good to see in the future. Ken Fisher
