Best Photoshop Setup for Smooth Performance – Tips & Hardware Suggestions?

[rock_1355]

Hi Adobe Community,

I’ve been working more heavily in Photoshop (part of the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem) lately, and I’m looking to optimize both my hardware and software setup for better performance—especially when working with large files, smart objects, and layer-heavy projects.

I’d love your insights on a few key things:

What I’d like to know:

• What hardware upgrades (RAM, GPU, SSDs) made the biggest difference in your Photoshop performance?

• Anyone using AMD GPUs with Photoshop—how’s the performance vs. NVIDIA?

• Are there any Photoshop preferences or performance settings that you recommend adjusting?

• How do you manage scratch disks, cache settings, or plug-ins to keep things running smoothly?

My current setup (for context):

• Ryzen 7 CPU

• 16GB RAM

• AMD Radeon GPU

• Windows 11

• Photoshop 2024 (latest update)

Any advice on getting the most out of this setup—or recommendations for my next upgrade—would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance for your tips!

Best,
Rao Henry

[davescm · Accepted solution]

• What hardware upgrades (RAM, GPU, SSDs) made the biggest difference in your Photoshop performance?
  Scratch disk speed. 16GB RAM is realy considered the mimimum now. However, no matter how much RAM you have once you get above 32-64GB it makes little difference (I have 256GB here but that is for 3D physics simulations not Photoshop). Photoshop will always swap data in RAM with the scratch disk so you want a fast disk with plenty of space (for large files that means 500GB -1TB free.

• Anyone using AMD GPUs with Photoshop—how’s the performance vs. NVIDIA?
  Sorry, I can't answer that as I only use NVidia

• Are there any Photoshop preferences or performance settings that you recommend adjusting?
  In Preferences > Performance set your cache and tile size for the type of documents you most regularly use (cache levels 4-6 tile size 1024k)

• How do you manage scratch disks, cache settings, or plug-ins to keep things running smoothly?
  My main scratch disk is an NVMe drive as that is the fastest available on my system
  When saving PSD/PSB files I disable file compression. That results in larger files on disk, but with much faster save and load times. Disk space is cheap compared to waiting time.

Dave

[Anshul_Saini · Accepted solution]

Hi @rock_1355,

Thanks for reaching out. It’s great to hear you’re diving deeper into Photoshop and looking to optimize your setup!

Just adding on to what Dave already mentioned (solid insights):

• RAM: We generally recommend upgrading to 32–64GB RAM for performance stability with large files and complex projects. If you’re working with DDR5 memory, even better, higher transfer rates (up to 7600MT/s in the current market) can help boost responsiveness in memory-intensive tasks.

• Scratch Disks: Photoshop relies heavily on scratch disks, especially when working with high-res files and multiple layers. We suggest using an M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD with read speeds of ~7450 MB/s and write speeds of ~6900 MB/s to minimize save/load times and reduce lag during heavy operations.

• GPU: A dedicated GPU (not integrated) is important for optimal performance, particularly for GPU-accelerated features like Neural Filters, Select Subject, and smooth canvas interactions. Both AMD and NVIDIA work well, but do ensure your system meets the requirements for Photoshop.

Also, depending on your CPU/motherboard pairing, ensuring full bandwidth utilization for GPU, RAM, and SSDs can make a noticeable difference.

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

Anshul Saini

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

• Are there any Photoshop preferences or performance settings that you recommend adjusting?

By @rock_1355

Adobe has a help article that offers suggestions about that:

Optimize Photoshop performance