Inspiring

Question

Does Graphics Card Matter

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
May 12, 2019
4 replies
5573 views

-Windows7 64bit

-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

-Intel i7 3930k

-40GB ram DDR3

-Several terabytes hard drive space (over several drives)

-Photoshop CC2014.2, sometimes I go up to the latest version since I am subscribed, but always seem to revert back to 2014.2 because of the familiarity with it

Hi all. My PC is a little older now, but runs Photoshop quite well.

For basic digital painting, such as using paintbrush tool, mixer brush, smudge brush, etc, and all other basic tools. No major rendering going on, just drawing/sketching/painting on a canvas etc.

Will upgrading the graphics card make a difference here? Or the processor? Will a much faster processor get rid of the delay on the mixer brush lag when "sample all layers" is turned on? or is that graphics card dependant? it is an older card, and sometimes I see delays with the mixer brush, especially if (sample all layers) is turned on. Brush lag also happens quite often, on higher resolution documents (300dpi for example).

Are these slowdown issues related to any of my outdated hardware, or are they issues with Photoshop? would upgrading the video card/processor make a big difference here or would it be a waste of money?

Other art software runs much faster with no delays at all, so I am guessing this is just an inherent problem with Photoshop and the way it works - for example, there will always be these kinds of "lags" no matter what type of hardware you have.

Thank you for reading.

This topic has been closed for replies.

JJMack

Community Expert

If you only use Photoshop as long as adapter is supported by Photoshop and the device drivers are good Photoshop Performance should be good. Photoshop does not use your GPU all that much. However, If you also do Video editing and use Adobe Applications ik Premier Pro and After Effects. I would recommend a high end Nvidia Quadro display adapter and Nvidia Plugins for Adobe deskop applications

JJMack

davidc1815

Brainiac

When painting with the Mixer Brush I find that a large brush and an opened up area of image to work on, cause slow down. So I don't use v large brushes and when slow down occurs, I zoom in on the area I am working on so PS is not having to manipulate so many pixels. It's a workaround - but OK for me. I'm using a laptop with a GTX960M graphics card and 32GB of ram.

davescm

Community Expert

Hi

I had to smile at the testing with a 15,000 pixel brush. In the real world how often would you expect to do that ?

Photoshop is not a heavy user of the GPU outside of a few filters. Even 3D only uses the GPU for preview, final rendering is done on the CPU. If you were asking about a GPU for a 3D application I would advise the largest memory and fastest GPU you can afford. However, for Photoshop, stick with what you have.

I have a similar system here 3930K processor, 64GBRAM but with a GTX1080 CPU. I use the latest version 20.0.4 of Photoshop.

I'd be happy to replicate a mixer brush test for you.

Post an image we can test with. Tell us exactly what adjustment layer(s) you have above it.
Tell us exactly the mixer brush size, settings and what is loaded on it. (take a screenshot of the options bar) Use teh brush and use the time in the info panel to time the stroke delay. I will replicate it here for you and give you my results.

Dave

dzigakaiser

Known Participant

davescm wrote
Jane
I can't either - 5000px is max here
Dave

I did say 5000 pixels. Not something you'd do in real life, but I was trying to think of something that would test the system hard enough to produce a decent time delay. After reading that the OP had instant response with the huge image Liquify preview, it seems that the filter works entirely with a screen sized version of the full image, so it would make no difference if the image was 1000, or 50,000 pixels wide.

Adobe took some stick from the haters on PetaPixel this week, with one poster mithering about Photoshop only using one core. In actual fact, several functions make good use of the CPU, including the Mixer brush. It's not 100%, and the GPU is just ticking over, but every thread has some activity.

I wanted to test my RTX2070, so thought the Oil Paint filter might give it some work to do. So I knocked up this rough sketch when I was still using the GTX970

This is the result of the Oil Paint filter with the GTX970

But I got an entirely different result with the RTX2070

Putting my sensible hat back on, this is interesting. Since I last closed Photoshop I have had some very large documents open for testing for this thread. That included the castle image at 50,000 pixels wide, but it is now back down to 20,000 pixels wide. You can see I still have some substantial temporary files in Photoshop's primary scratch drive. It's worth noting that I reduced the 50k pixel document back to 20k pixels by stepping back through history, which was instant. Using Image size was taking some time with those sizes.

So the interesting thing is that I am seeing noticeable lag while working on the 500 pixel wide spoof image above. More than a second just to turn on a layer, and see it change on the screen, and the document is only 4Mb when open.

Photoshop is hogging all 70% of my 64Gb RAM available to it.

The 20k pixel image is only 1.5Gb opened, and even when working on another, _much_ smaller document, I am being forced to use scratch space. That is not very efficient I'm thinking. To be fair, I can tab back to the large image and have all of its history states still available, and come to think of it, I have history set to 300 at the moment

Both my primary scratch and boot drives are 512Gb Samsung 960PRO, and even with the sort of performance shown below, I am experiencing unworkable lag with the most simple of functions.

What is also unsettling is that using Edit > Purge > All released hardly any RAM, and made no difference to the large temp files. So I have sacrificed all that history with very little gain. I am also still seeing exactly the same lag working on the tiny Mona Lisa spoof image. That doesn't make any sense at all!

I'm getting a bit peeved now. Even after Purging All, and closing every open document and reopening the tiny Mona Lisa document, I still have a 6.7Gb temp file, and _still_ have the lag. That is crazy! Closing Photoshop did at least release all temp files and memory.

If anyone has managed to read this long post, then I guess it tells us to take scratch space seriously, and use fast drives. The biggest mystery to me is why Purge All made so little difference to Photoshop's RAM use. The screen shot above shows 45.9Gb being used. That dropped to 9.6Gb after closing Photoshop, so it was still tying up 36.3 Gb of memory with everything purged, and no Smart Objects in the open documents.

I can confirm that purging everything rarely actually purges much. As far as my experience goes most of the data is kept in the RAM for all open documents. What I also observed many times is that the purge results inside the same file and close to each other time-wise can be very different.

For example, I have a file that takes up 45GB of RAM after some time working in it. When I purge all, it releases from 500MB to 20GB and I cannot explain yet why most of the time it is on the lower end.

At times I am able to get a little better purge results if I create a new document while the big one is still open, add a layer, delete the layer and then use "Purge All" in that document. Or when I do a small operation after purging and then purge again. Could be completely random, too, though.

Fast scratch disks are definitely the way to go no matter what, since 60-100GB are easily reached with large PSBs.

Regarding general performance, I am still searching for the best combination of specs for PSBs with houndreds of layers and adjustments, some smart objects and at resolutions of 5K to 10K for daily matte painting.

I upgraded two years ago from:

i7 2600k@4GHz

64GB DDR3

GTX560 3GB

to:

i7 6600k@4.2GHz

64GB DDR4

GTX1070 6GB

and all I can say is that it feels absolutely identical In general I think GHz per core, RAM size and speed and drive speed are the most important factors.

So, to come back to the main question @OP:

I do not believe you will feel a noticeable difference upgrading your graphics card. If the mixer brush is multi threaded, more CPU cores might help, but maybe it already boosts your performance to use a very fast scratch disk in case PS is constantly caching there while using the mixer brush (not sure if that's the case).

Adjustment layers also decrease Photoshops performance drastically which is why I am not surprised to hear about the mixer brush lags set to use all layers:0

Creating worlds for screen and paper - also offering photo resources and HDRIs on www.dziga.com

G

gangeekAuthor

Inspiring

Yes, I am able to use the grpahics processor and have full access to all the features such as basic, normal or advanced mode. For this test, I was in basic mode, with 'use graphics processor to accelerate computation" and "use open CL' enabled. Cache Levels is 1, and Cache Tile Size is 128K - I find these last two options work best when using the mixer brush.

ok. here are results.

I googled "complex image" and found this spiral-yellow/red/orange cube/block image. Saved it.

Loaded it into Photoshop and changed the pixel dimensions to 20,000 pixels (72dpi) . This part took just a few seconds.

I then loaded the liquify filter, and changed brush size to 10,000. I then painted in the preview window, and there was no delay at all. Zero delay. The preview kept up with the cursor, 100%.

I then clicked OK. It took about 10 seconds to render.

Next, I closed the document. Then I reloaded it in again. So the image is freshly loaded into Photoshop again.

This time, I changed canvas size to 50,000 pixels. It took about 4-5 seconds.

Again I went to Liquify filter, and changed brush size to maximum which is 15,000 pixels. Again, there is *zero* delay when painting in the preview window - the cursor keeps up no problem at all.

I painted all kinds of crazy swirls and yes, after hitting OK, the delay is unbearable. If I paint just a few swirls, it handles it ok when you press ok (it takes a minute or so if you did just a couple of swirls). But if you paint too many swirls, the delay looks to freeze my computer, so I just cancelled out.

Diagnosis? If this unbearable delay is happening on my ancient video card, and also happens on your new video card, then this problem seems to be a problem with Photoshop? Perhaps the engineers have not optimized the code to run the software at faster speeds with updated and current hardware? Maybe this verifies the idea that it doesn't make sense to upgrade hardware at ridiculous costs if it isn't going to make a difference.

I have always come to conclusion that even older, modest hardware is enough to run this program. I somehow doubt that upgrading to expensive, current and ultra-fast hardware makes a difference with Photoshop unfortunately. I think it might has to do with the coding, and that it does not take advantage of current hardware specifications, unfortunately.

This is precisely why I am so afraid to spend all this money on hardware that is not going to make any noticeable difference in Photoshop.

Here is my worry: I load a photo into Photoshop. On the layer above, I add an highlights/shadows adjustment layer, and increase the highlights and shadows with the sliders. Now, I go back down to the first layer, and select mixer brush tool. I turn on 'sample all layers'. I begin to use the mixer brush. The delay is unbearable. It is too slow to paint/blend with. This is because of the adjustment layer on top.

So, I figure I will upgrade my video card to ifix this exact problem. But I am afraid that after spending all the money and time to install the graphics card, that when I follow the same steps, that I will get the same lag when using the mixer brush on this same image. I am not confident that a new graphics card would solve this issue, I am afradi that it is an Adobe issue and that Photoshop is just built this way, no matter what graphics card I have.

What think you?

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

It's not a good idea to set Cache levels to 1. It actually warns you not to do it, so I wonder why it is even an option.

It sounds like you are fine with that GTX680Ti. I doubt if anyone reading this could go crazy with Liquify with a 50,000 pixel wide busy landscape, and not have a significant delay after clicking OK. In fact, I bet a good half of people would have their systems lock up completely.

I am not sure what you mean by Highlights/Shadows adjustment layer, as I appear to have lost mine.

Do you mean you make the layer a Smart Object and use the Camera RAW filter? If yes, then that should cause any sort of lag.

The mixer brush can definitely run into lag with large brush sizes. Ti give you something to gauge that against, this is a 5000 pixel mixer brush run corner to corner of a 20,000 pixel wide landscape, and it took 20 seconds.

You can set the Info panel to show timing, and lots more, via its Panel Options

Unless you do 3D, video or play games, then I really don't think you'd see much bang for your buck by investing in an expensive new video card. Check out the Puget Systems articles — which I thought I'd linked to, but forgot to.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php

These filters show all the Photoshop/GPU articles

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?filter[]=Photoshop&filter[]=Video%20Cards

Here you go. From a lowly GTX1050 ($130) to an uber expensive Titan V 12Gb ($3200 !!!) there's barely any difference.

Above chart comes from this article:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-GPU-Performance-1139/

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I looked at the thread title and expected to say 'no it doesn't' but that GTX680 is maybe getting a touch long in the tooth now. I'm still thinking that if the functions you need work OK, then you are not going to see much difference from an upgrade. There is also that all important concept of having a 'balanced system'. I'm thinking that running that card, the rest of the system is going to be of a similar age, which means even less impact from a new video card.

Try this:

Open Preferences > Performance

Are Use Graphics Processor and OpenCL both checked?

Are you able to set Drawing Mode to Advanced?

If yes to those then you'll be able to use those functions that need the GPU.

Load a complex image and upress it to about 20,000 pixels wide

Open the Liquify filter, and increase the brush size to about half the document size...

And go totally crazy. If the preview keeps up with the cursor, then you are good to go. Note: I think the GPU only gets heavy use during the preview, and the CPU takes over after you click on OK.

I thought I make this a real test and upsized the castle image to 50,000 pixels wide, and nearly froze my system. I spent some dollars on that RTX2070 replacing a GTX970, and in Photoshop, I am not seeing any difference.

G

gangeekAuthor

Inspiring

thank you Trevor! I will try this right now and will reply here shortly after I have run this test

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