A question for the computer geeks

[karohemd]

Will a reasonable graphics card improve system performance for working in photoshop (mainly editing photos)? I don't need it to play games but I could afford a 128MB GeForce card, for example.
My current issue is speed in loading/converting photos. I'm going to upgrade my system RAM, anyway, which should help already.

Edit: Sorted, thanks! More system RAM it is, then.

Comments

[chrisvenus]

It would depend on what you are doing really. Graphics cards improve performance if it can perform functions in hardware that it was previously doing in software. usually this means 3d stuff. For photoshop loading is very unlikely to be helped by the graphics card and converting (assuming we are tlaking resampling) is unlikely to be helped.

The main factor is system memory as you have already worked out. I don't know what you have and what you are going up to but I think you will get a much better performance increaase from memory than you ever would with a GFX card.

[davedevil.livejournal.com]

You've not mentioned the amount f ram you have, the processor speed or where the images are beign read from. All of these cause issue. Normally with big graphics the prefrence is as much ram as possible, then more ram again

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

I don't think Photoshop uses graphics cards as anything other than a display device. So, I'd think anything with sufficient RAM will do (i.e. enough to store ideally three framebuffers for your resolution, 1600x1200x32bit takes 7.5MB).

Although it is an interesting idea. A lot of Photoshop filters are large matrix operations, which is exactly what graphics cards are good at. I wonder why Adobe haven't started using the available processing power?

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Get more RAM -- as much as you can afford/fit in the computer -- ahead of a new graphics card; it'll make much more of a difference.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Currently I have only 512MB RAM on a 1.5GB AMD Duron processor.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Yes, converting from RAW into photoshop format to work on it and resampling, applying effects/filters and the like.

[kingnat.livejournal.com]

Forget the graphics card; for photoshop you wouldn't notice the difference between a £30 PCI graphics card with 32meg and a £300 PCI-e graphics card with 512meg. Increase your system ram if you can as that's the real bottleneck with photoshop (and other image editing software)

The only exception is the pro-level graphics cards (e.g. the nVidia Quadro) but even then the advantage is questionable and only worthwhile if you're also using the same machine as a 3D modeling/rendering workstation.

[sogoth.livejournal.com]

As the others have said. Graphics card isn't an issue with photoshop. There are two options.

1) More ram for your computer. Definate speed up, but there are limits for how much ram will have any effect. I went from 512 to 2gig in my work laptop to try and speed it up. Didn't do a hell of a lot.

2) Make sure photoshop's swap file is on a separate physical disk drive and as big as you can possibly make it. The swap file is where photoshop keeps your stuff while you are working on it. If you have the application and swap file on the same physical disk drive the computer is constantly respinning the disk to access the applicaiton files and your image.

So. Plan A would be to add a little bit more ram and buy a small hard drive to dedicate to mostly swap file.