GPU or CPU for indd

Any new Mac laptop is more than good enough to run InDesign. That’s probably been true since the M1, but it’s even more true today with the announcement of the M3 MacBook Air. I think an M3 Air with 16–24GB unified memory and enough storage space should run InDesign well. But I did choose the MacBook Pro, for reasons other than InDesign.

Currently my problem is that it lags quickly after adding only 3 or 4 indds in my document.

By @bbell_it

It might help to order a Mac laptop with more than 16GB of unified memory. But you probably won’t need more than 24GB for InDesign alone. You may want your next Mac to have 32GB of unified memory if you frequently also keep other Adobe apps open at the same time, such as Photoshop and Illustrator in addition to InDesign.

What is the best between more GPU core or more cpu core ?

By @bbell_it

Current Macs have many CPU and GPU cores, but the problem is that InDesign is not able to take advantage of all of them. It would not be expected to, because the high core counts are for apps that must re-render constantly, such as video editing and 3D rendering apps. InDesign just doesn’t strain the CPU very much. For example, if you fall into the trap of buying an M3 Max MacBook Pro for InDesign because it has 14 CPU cores instead of 8 and you think this is “future-proofing,” it won’t work that way for InDesign.

The screen shots below show CPU and GPU usage on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 8 CPU and 14 GPU cores. I opened 7 documents from a 400+ page book with many graphics, set to high resolution display, and I pressed Page Down and Page Up to go through each page. I also used scrubby zoom, which uses the GPU.

You can see that even though my Mac is not the newest or more powerful, all CPU cores are not fully used by InDesign. When turning pages with placed graphics, Core 3 does most of the work and is not totally busy, Cores 4 through 6 do some work, but Cores 7 and 8 barely do anything. (The two efficiency cores are very busy, which is normal because those are always handling routine OS and app tasks that are low priority.)

And yet, the InDesign pages turn instantly, with no lag, on my M1 Pro. That may partly be explained by the GPU graph, which is fairly busy while I’m turning pages. But even it is not maxed out like it can be when editing video.

So the answer to your question is, what does benefit InDesign speed the most is higher CPU single-core performance. That happens generationally, so an M3 and M2 should generally run InDesign faster than an M1 (and all will be much faster than any Intel Mac, if that’s what you currently have). In other words, you’ll probably see more InDesign performance improvement from switching from M1 to M3 than you would by getting a 20-core M1 Ultra instead of an 8-core M1. If you upgrade to 12 or 20 CPU cores because somebody told you to “max it out,” all that will mean for InDesign is you paid a lot of extra money for more cores that InDesign does not have enough work for. But the M3 increases single-core performance, which InDesign does benefit from because it can keep one or two cores busy.

It’s the same with GPU cores. InDesign should be fine on the GPU of any current generation Mac…as long as there is enough unified memory to keep the GPU fed. Moving up to excessive GPU cores, such as the 76-core GPU in the M2 Ultra, means InDesign uses the few cores that it has enough work for, and the rest of the cores you paid for contribute nothing. Those high GPU core counts are definitely for 3D (Adobe Substance), AI (Photoshop, Camera Raw, Lightroom), and video editing/visual effects (Adobe Premiere Pro/After Effects), where all cores might get a constant stream of pixels to re-render. But more GPU cores do not do much to speed the editing of static page layouts (InDesign).

@bbell_it 

Does it have to be Mac? Don't want to start any wars - just asking.

On any reasonably modern system, the hierarchy of performance increase is —

• RAM. 16GB is a minimum. 32GB will improve performance in many ways.
• CPU. A major leap in CPU will show enhanced performance. Most minor updates are not worth any change, though, especially on the Wintel side. (That is, a somewhat more muscular processor in the same line is unlikely to be worth the cost of upgrade.)
• GPU. The Adobe apps are not, for the most part, intensely reliant on GPU power. Midrange is good enough for all but the most extreme work with very large Photoshop images and complex Premiere/AfterEffect realtime work.
• Local drives. Local SSDs will make a huge difference over even the fastest HDDs. Your boot and app drive should be an SSD; it's nice to have a second SSD for data.

But the short answer is always "enough RAM."

Definitely more CPU and more RAM 

The more the better.