What's more important for video & photo editing? (GPU vs RAM)

[chrisr5557]

Hello all,

I have been searching the internet in hopes to answer this question but have not found a solid answer.

I am getting a new laptop, I use adobe premiere, photoshop, and Lightroom more than anything else and not sure which matters more. One of the laptops I am looking at has a GTX 2070 with 8bg ram, and the other has a GTX 2060 with 6gb Ram. However the laptop with the lessor graphics card (GTX 2060) is expandable to 64 gb RAM versus the other that is 32 gb.

So my question is, which matters more when it comes to video and photo editing? A good graphics card with 64gb ram, or a better graphics card with 32gb ram??

Any help finding a solid answer to this would be extremely appreciated! Thank you.

[Nancy OShea]

Video editing and photo editing have slightly different requirements.  Depending on what you're doing, CPU is more important at times.  Other times GPU is more important.  And at all times, RAM is important.  Besides, RAM is relatively cheap.  So it should never be an either or contest.  Buy the best system you can afford.

See links below for custom workstations optimized for Photoshop CC  and another for Premier Pro

Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Photoshop-CC-139

Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-143

[chrisr5557]

THanks for the feedback, Nancy. However, its only about either or because they are both within the price range. So this answer (while appreciated) does not really answer the question. For video editing (I do more video than photo), one has the option to have 64gb ram with a lessor graphics card (Nvideo 2060 w/ 6gb ram) and the other has the option to have 32gb ram with a greator graphics card (Nvideo 2070 8gb ram). Pricing, they are both at the top of my budget. So my question would still be, will one be better for videography, or with the better graphics card vs more ram basically equal itself out and I am over thinking?

Thanks for the help.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

So my question would still be, will one be better for videography, or with the better graphics card vs more ram basically equal itself out and I am over thinking?

Well, to be blunt, that's a rather pointless debate. You are not even asking the most important question: Would Adobe apps even be able to use a notable fraction of that performance and the long and short answer to this is no. At the moment there isn't even any specific support for those cards in any program other than the generic CUDA/ OpenCL support via the NVidia driver. Beyond that it's pretty much moot whether you have 6 or 8 GB on the cards or 32 or 64 GB on your system. It's not like any video editing app on this planet would extensively buffer to RAM when they can stream directly from the harddrives and even for image editing there is a sweet spot where e.g. Photoshop will no longer use more RAM and swap its display tiles to disk. So in the end, it really doesn't matter much what you get - either of those graphics cards will have plenty of juice even for 4k editing and whether or not having more RAM will do anything beyond increasing power consumption and thermal issues is anyone's guess. You'd have to lay out a specific use case to justify that like genuinely editing huge gigapixel images or having hundreds of large images open in PS at the same time.

Mylenium

[Abambo · Accepted solution]

32Gb is for the moment a good RAM configuration and for my next computer I will expand to 32Gb. The usage of the graphics card is different from program to program so the needs are different. But just at looking at your specs I would say that you would not notice a difference in performance by using either of them for Adobe programs.

[chrisr5557]

Thank you for the responses. I appreciate the help and used this information when deciding which laptop to go with. Much appreciate people with more knowledge than me being around here to help me learn and understand!