The guys over at creativetechs.com have put the recently-released Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta through its paces via a battery of tests and discovered that the new version is on average 40 to 55 percent faster (some test results being as much as 60% faster) than the present Photoshop CS2 version.

For the full rundown as well as individual test results, click here. The tests were performed on a newly shipped 3 GHz Mac Pro with 4 gigabytes of RAM and the History States set to 1.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is expected in 2007 and is the first version of Photoshop to be a full Universal Binary, functioning natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based hardware.

The Photoshop CS3 beta requires a Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, a 1 GHz G4 or G5 PowerPC processor of an Intel-based Macintosh. 512 megabytes of RAM and a minimum screen resolution of 1024x769 are also required.

If you have any comments, feedback or Photoshop tests of your own, let us know.