While the web is buzzing with reports about how much faster Photoshop CS3 is on Intel Macs, there’s nary an article on the impressive speed improvements in InDesign CS3. As of this writing, if you search for "indesign benchmarks" or "indesign cs3 benchmarks" you get an astonishing combined total of one result (compared to about 2,000 results for "photoshop benchmarks" and "photoshop cs3 benchmarks").

So I fired up InDesign CS2 and CS3, whipped out my stopwatch, and set out to do some InDesign CS3 benchmarks of my own. And you thought your Wednesday night was awesome!

The rules: The tests were done on a Mac Pro Quad running at 3 GHz with 4 GB of RAM. (I know, right?) Each test was done with no other applications running, and was the average of 3 timings. (I used my iPhone as the stopwatch. Major nerdgasm.)

The thick and thin of it – InDesign CS3 is, of course, much faster than InDesign CS2. Here are the three tests I performed and the results:

Start-up:
• InDesign CS2: 13.9 seconds
• InDesign CS3: 6.2 seconds

Exporting a 100-page PDF with press-quality, transparency, text, and no images:
• InDesign CS2: 10.9 seconds
• InDesign CS3: 3.7 seconds

Exporting a 12-page PDF with press-quality, transparency, text, and images (EPSs and PSDs):
• InDesign CS2: 57.9 seconds
• InDesign CS3: 30.7 seconds

So there you have it. InDesign CS3 benchmarks. Now the world can know.