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Known Participant
March 27, 2024
Question

How far should I push ram? Just did an upgrade and WOW what a difference!

  • March 27, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 2138 views

Just putting this out here and also asking a question in case anybody has dealt with this issue I have. 

I had 32 gigs of ddr4 running at the default 2133 mhz for sometime and photoshop as far as performance (With one glaring issue, see my other thread i just posted.) was fine on the 4k or so canvas sizes i worked on. recently I started getting print commissions that require as much as a 20k canvas which was utterly unworkable.  I'm working on one now and have it at about 8k in which i'll do 98% of the painting and just touch it up at native resolution which is about 20k but even at 8k the brush lag was pretty bad with some of my custom brushes, REALLY slowing down my workflow. 

I recently finally got another 32 gigs of ram for a total of 64 and this made a HUGE difference but brush lag with my custom mixer brushes i use was still pretty noticable but at least workable and only minorly slowed me down. 

After reading that ram speed makes basically no difference in ps i was curious and after a lot of headaches i finally got my ram running at 3200ghz totally stable and I don't know what people are talking about because it made the brush lag again noticably better, sometimes nonexistent on this 8k canvas i'm working on.  I'm just mentioning this because despite what people have said elsewhere i did clearly see a difference and it's worth looking into if you're having brush lag on big documents. 

So my question is, considering PS BARELY uses gpu/cpu  but is an absolute ram hog (Gpu/cpu get about 5% utilization most of the time whereas ram is getting 70ish percent) would upgrading to 128 gb of ram allow me to work natively on gigantic documents like 20k? Is that even worth doing?

What setups do people have for gigantic print poster size documents to get them to run smoothly and paint on them? 

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1 reply

didiermazier
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 27, 2024

The more the best

😉

Known Participant
March 27, 2024

So as long as cpu/gpu utilization is low is that how ps works? Just keep throwing ram at it and you can work in bigger and bigger documents?

davescm
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 27, 2024

The biggest impact is scratch disk space and speed. No matter how much RAM you have, I have 256GB installed but did not install that for Photoshop, Photoshop is going to swap RAM and scratch disk as you work. Beyond around 64GB RAM, a fast NVMe scratch drive with plenty of space (500GB +) will have the biggest impact.

 

In addition, make sure you are not working at unnecessarily high pixel counts. The thing about large posters etc is that they are viewed from a greater distance. So whilst you view an A3 size book spread from 20 inches or so, a 15 foot poster is viewed from several feet away. Therefore the ppi requirement for the large poster is much smaller than that for the book-spread. Printing the large poster at 300ppi is wasted as at viewing distance human eyes just can't resolve that level of detail. There is a formula for ppi required based on viewing distance which I will post when I get back to my office.

 

Dave