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This isn’t the simplest answer, but it’s worth thinking through. For basic operations like traditional corrections (the kind done since the 1990s), yes, Photoshop is still largely CPU-based. But there are growing areas of Photoshop where the GPU is becoming increasingly important, much more so than a few years ago, so you should evaluate whether those affect you.
If most of your work is adjustment layers on a simple photo, then any recent GPU including integrated graphics should be OK. With this kind of editing you might not see too much use of the GPU.
Recently there has been significant work “under the hood” on basic architecture, to make more Photoshop features take advantage of CPU cores and GPU power. In the picture below of the Performance preferences, some evidence of that work are the Multithreaded Compositing and GPU Compositing options. Those were added relatively recently after the internal rewrites. Because those are about compositing, you might not see them cause much CPU/GPU load for a document with one or two layers. But the more layers, masks, and other compositing features the document uses, the more difference these CPU/GPU optimizations should make.
When the pointer is over the Use Graphics Processor option, the Description lists some features that use the GPU. But that’s not the whole story. You probably know that many photo apps including Photoshop have made a massive push into features relying on machine learning and generative AI. Well, when processed locally, the speed of that set of features can roughly be described as “all GPU, no CPU.” With those features, having 36 fast CPU cores will be no faster than having 6 CPU cores, but having a powerful GPU will make a big difference. The more you include those features in your workflow, the more you’re going to see the GPU being used more heavily than in the past. But Photoshop doesn’t necessarily need a top-of-the-line GPU at this time, just a good one.
There is another very big question: How much is Adobe Camera Raw part of your Photoshop workflow? Because in many ways, acceptable Camera Raw performance is even more dependent on GPU power. This is partly because it’s constantly re-rendering from raw, but also for its own machine learning/AI features such as Denoise. Right now, improving Denoise performance (because it’s often applied in bulk) may be the number one thing driving Camera Raw users to upgrade to a faster GPU. (If you also use Lightroom Classic, note that Adobe says the new time-saving GPU-accelerated preview generation works best if you have 16GB of VRAM; it does work with less but is less effective.) These are some examples of where these photo apps are going with GPU requirements: They are going up.
So to summarize, if your Photoshop edits are more traditional in nature, maybe a midrange GPU is fine. But the larger and more complicated your documents are; and/or the more you want to use the latest machine learning/AI features especially in Camera Raw & Lightroom, the more you want to get a higher-end GPU. It seems like many of the newest features are GPU-accelerated in all those apps.
(By the way, the Puget Bench test descriptions for Photoshop and Camera Raw are oddly lacking in recent features including AI features and those Adobe has recently GPU-accelerated.)
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