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Rustar
Known Participant
March 23, 2018
Question

Video Card upgrade for better performance with Indesign CC2018

  • March 23, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 612 views

My question is, is it worth it to upgrade to a newer video card with more vram for increase performance? Recently I started working on a brochure with many transparencies and photo's. Everytime I try to work on it, the screen freezes and I have to wait 5-8 seconds before I can continue. Every single time I make any change.

We recently upgraded our main PC(windows10 64bit) to 16 core processor and 32GB of ram. The video card and an older old SSD card(250GB) is the only items not upgraded. The video card im running now is an older Nvidia GTX 660 Ti 2GB vram.

I was looking at a Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB. Would this video card help that much with my slowing issues?

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1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
March 23, 2018

Generally speaking, InDesign performance is much less dependent on video card / GPU performance than Photoshop's performance.

More memory and use of an SSD give you the most “bang per buck” in terms of investment for InDesign performance.

But you already have 32GB which should greatly exceed the needs of InDesign in any situation. And you already have an SSD. Even what you describe as “an older SSD” should greatly improve performance of InDesign over any rotating disk assuming that the SSD stores the InDesign software, you temporary directories, and your data files. If your data files and temporary directories are stored on standard, rotating hard disk drives, then that may be your bottleneck. Replace any remaining hard disk drives with SSDs. They are relatively inexpensive these days. Newer technology SSD drives (such as used in upcoming products from Intel) are exceptionally expensive and have relatively low capacity at this point.

If you are working on documents with many of the assets (photos, illustrations, etc.) linked to on servers, moving those assets to your computer's own disk drives can dramatically improve nor only performance, but reliability (especially when the network hiccups)!

Also, be careful what features you leave enabled within InDesign. In many cases, turning the Preflight feature Off dramatically improves performance.

I would not run out and buy a new video card unless you were upgrading to a 4K ultra high definition monitor!

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    R
    RustarAuthor
    Known Participant
    March 23, 2018

    Thank you for the quick response. All my apps are on the SDD drive. It is %75 full. This dramatic slow down seemed to just happen in last few weeks.
    It is worse using high res files and many drop shadows and transparencies. And when I run Indesign, it shows in the task manager that its using GPU 0 - 3D engine. So naturally I thought maybe the old video card was slowing the screen redraw and causing hangup. I dont know what to do. That video card is over $300. It would be a waste if that didnt work.

    I also use illustrator, and its IMPOSSIBLE to use GPU performance option. It runs worse than indesign does when its on. So naturally I was suspect of a slow GPU problem. My cpu is the new Ryzen 7 processor, with 16 cores(32 threads) and 32GB memory. So my cpu and ram should be plenty good.

    MilesKilo
    MilesKilo
    Participating Frequently
    March 23, 2018

    GTX 660 Ti is a pretty decent video card and, as Dov points out, InDesign is not as reliant on the GPU as PhotoShop. Upgrading to a 1060 probably is not a huge improvement since it's still a '60 series (the last 2 digits give you a very rough idea of speed).

    You may want to try closing down ALL other applications (including web browsers) on your system to see if maybe InDesign is contending with other applications for GPU memory. The other thing you can try is to turn off GPU usage entirely to see, seeing that your Ryzen is none too shabby.

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