Inspiring

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Buying a PC for Photoshop in 2022

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 21, 2022
4 replies
15476 views

I’m buying a new PC, but the Photoshop system requirements on the Adobe site and the specs on the manufacturer site seem like apples and oranges. For instance, for a Graphics Card, the Adobe site says, 'Minimum: GPU with DirectX 12 support and 1.5 GB of GPU memory' or 'Recommended: GPU with DirectX 12 support and 4 GB of GPU memory for 4k displays and greater;' while the manufacturer offers two options: 'Intel Graphics 630' or 'NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, 4 GB GDDR6.' Same problem with the Processor descriptions. How do I translate the inconsistent descriptions to make a purchase?

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Correct answer D Fosse

Some of those requirements can roughly be translated as "anything newer than 8-10 years". It doesn't really apply if you're getting a new machine now.

For instance, I can't imagine you can even find a CPU without 64 bit support nowadays. The same probably goes for SSE 4.2, which is standard now.

Any i3, i5 or i7 should work well.

As for GPU, we already agreed that an integrated Intel GPU is not good enough. A NVidia GTX 1650 or upwards is a good choice.

An often undercommunicated requirement for Photoshop is disk capacity and speed. Here, the official system requirements are somewhat unrealistic. You should always have 250-500 GB or so free space, for the Photoshop scratch disk. This is for temporary storage of working data that can't be held in RAM. The ideal type of drive is what's known as NVMe or PCIe M.2. They are much faster than the previous generation of SATA SSDs, which in turn is much faster than old-fashioned spinning disks.

RAM isn't so critical. There's never "enough" anyway. Anywhere between 16 to 64 GB is fine.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Puget Systems has Photoshop-ready workstations.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Photoshop-139/Buy_150

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

OzPhotoMan

Inspiring

Very useful discussion, as my PC died last week. Currently in for a repair assessment, but I think I will need a new box. It is an old box, 12 years old. It is running sata drives with 16Gb of ram. It ran PS OK, but a bit slow on some operations, incredibly so with LR when retouching to the point of being unusable, so I don't use LR. Mid last year I upgraded the video card to a GTX 1650 super, according to this thread it is a good card for PS, so I will most likely put that card in the new box. I am not using PS professionaly any more so speed was not terribly important.

I was looking at a new PC about a year ago and Adobe then were much more specific about specifications, quoting specific graphics cards and CPU's. The latest info from Adobe is much more generic which is very annoying.

So, to confirm what others have said, would the GTX 1650 be adequate?

Now to decide on a CPU. Puget recommend the I9 12900 K, but that might be out of my budget. So I will probably settle for an I7 12700K.

None of my current files files are over 2gb and I don't anticipate going over 2gb imoving forward, so 32Gb RAM is probably OK, I am in Australia.

Thoughts please?

D Fosse

Community Expert

Sounds good. There is no reason to think the GTX 1650 shouldn't perform well, aside from any driver bugs (which do happen).

i9 is probably overkill for Photoshop, which is largely not CPU-limited. i7 is plenty good enough.

The main bottleneck is I/O bandwidth, which translates to disk configuration, with RAM to cache and speed it up. 32 GB RAM will work well.

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

I would avoid an Intel GPU at all cost, as well as an integrated card.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Adding to Chuck's comment, we see a lot of threads here from people who buy laptops with powerful GPUs, but their laptops insist on using the built in Intel GPU with Photoshop to save battery use. It's fixable, but a PITA.

D Fosse

Community Expert

A laptop really isn't ideal for Photoshop, but if you choose carefully you may find one that works.

An Intel integrated GPU will not be sufficient for Photoshop. You need a dedicated GPU, and the GTX1650 should work well.

The problem is that many laptops have dual GPUs - Intel + dedicated NVidia/AMD card, switched according to workload and power. In that case you need to disable the Intel GPU completely.

Dual GPUs work for simple applications that don't really use the GPU for anything more than show an image on screen. But Photoshop uses the GPU for actual data processing, and the result returned to Photoshop for further processing. It's a two-way flow. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other. So there can only be one single GPU.

See section 7 and 8 here: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html

An additional consideration is disk space and configuration. Photoshop needs a lot of free disk space for the scratch disk. Make sure the laptop in question has a big internal drive, preferably 1 TB.

M

mcboatnerAuthor

Inspiring

Thank you, although I'm looking for a desktop tower.

Sameer K

Community Manager

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. We are here to help!

We understand the minimum & recommended specs could appear broad and unspecific. However, the idea is to give a baseline and a standard to look for before purchasing or opting for an upgrade.

Consider using GPUs with an average of 2000 operating per second or higher. You can check this on PassMark's benchmark: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/directCompute.html

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER stands at - 4545.

Please feel free to check with independent online benchmarks, stress tests, and reviews before making any purchase decisions. Please consider the type, size, or operation you would carry out in Photoshop.

We hope this helps. Let us know if it does.

Thanks!

Sameer K

M

mcboatnerAuthor

Inspiring

That is helpful, thanks! Can you do a similar translation for the Processor reqs? Adobe says, 'Intel® or AMD processor with 64-bit support; 2 GHz or faster processor with SSE 4.2 or later' while manufacturer offers options like, '10th Generation Intel Core i3-10105 (6 MB cache, 4 cores, 8 threads, 3.70 GHz to 4.40 GHz Turbo).' I see the GHz, but nothing about the bit support or SSE.

Sameer K

Community Manager

Hi, thanks for the response.

Please feel free to check the specification of the CPU you are planning to buy. For instance, when we look for '10th Generation Intel Core i3-10105', its specification are available here, please check the 'Advanced Technologies' section : https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/201894/intel-core-i310105-processor-6m-cache-up-to-4-40-ghz/specifications.html

In order to identify CPUs with SSE support, you can check here:https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000057621/processors.html & similar results from other manufacturers are also just a search away. We understand making a informed purchase decision is important and can be confusing.

We are here to help.

Thanks!

Sameer K

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