GPU choice

Photoshop can be a very resource hungry application.  I have seen Photoshop use all available RAN and start fill all my free disk space.  But the is not the norm. Some thing are have higher overhead than others.  Smart object  have  more overhead than normal layers  but have some advantages.   When you add multiple smart filters to smart object layer  updating one filter may require all other filters to be reapplied.  I could see that mays slow Photoshop response time.  However I can not say the I have seen Photoshop  putting a heavl load one one's GPU for any extended period of time.  Photoshop makes little use of you GPU. My Processor are slow Photoshop minimum requirement 2GHz.  I have two 6 core xeon processors.  That helps some but not all the much with Photoshop.  While sometime I may see Photoshop using all 24 threads at full capacity that is not  the normal cast.  Many the Photoshop does requires a sequential processing which can not be multi threaded well.

Right now I running a test of a script the replaces smart object layer contents in mockup. The seems to be a bug in Photoshop CC 2019 where Photoshop Replace Content will mess up the memory mockup and replace content will fail with an incorrect error message user cancel operation.

The test runs for 1.5 hours. You can see Photoshop is not putting a strain on  my processors

It only seems to be using three threads only one a processor is heavly used. And the is little IO utilization.

GPU not use at all during this batch job.

So you want the fasted Processor clock speed possible and SSD for scratch space and if you not editing huge documents 32GB of RAM will do.  It Photoshop start using GPU more down the line you can always replace you Display adapter.  They will be cheaper and faster in the future.

You can assess the affects of different processors and video cards with Photoshop and other content creation apps at  Puget Systems.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php

But basically, clock speed is king with Photoshop at least,  so the  9700K and 9900K CPUs are a good choice, and won't break the bank.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2018-Core-i7-9700K-i9-9900K-Performance-1248/

32Gb RAM is going to work well.  I have 64Gb with an i9-7900, and  I not ice the difference will how far I go before Photoshop starts creating large Scratch files.   My theory is that scratch data is a potential bottleneck with Photoshop, so NVMe drives like the Samsung 960PRO are a good investment.  I also have a theory that Smart Objects can be a source of lag for the same reason, so I have 512Gb 960PRO drives (among 16 drives in total)  that I use for the boot drive and scratch space.

Like Dave stressed, we don't know where Photoshop will go in the future, and I know at least one person on the Development team who is super into the power  of the GPU for  number crunching, so  we might be seeing more  use  being made of video cards going forward.

Hi

The current versions of Photoshop do not make heavy use of the GPU in the same way that say a 3D application would. So that GPU will run the current versions. As users we do not know what future versions may do.

Photoshop system requirements

Photoshop system requirements

Dave