External GPU / Overall GPU improvements

Question

I have an XPS 15 9500 with an NVidia GTX1650 internally. While it is a pretty speedy system considering it is a couple of years old  (Core i7, 64g ram btw) I wonder if I would see a noticeable improvement in speed of raw conversions, image processing, etc, if I were to add an external thunderbolt GPU with a 3xxx series GPU? I know PS and Camera Raw take advantage of GPU but I don't know if the potential improvement is worth the cost (and desk space)? Has anyone added one to their laptop and seen a significant bump in performance?

D Fosse · Answer

Probably not, at least not as long as your GPU has enough VRAM. 2GB is absolute minimum, 5 -10 comfortable, more even better.

The thing with PS GPU usage is that it's not so much about speed as such (most decent GPUs are "fast" enough) - it's that a lot of advanced functions just have to work. That's where older and/or underpowered GPUs tend to fall short: several functions just stop working, or work erratically and with bugs and problems. We see a lot of that here.

In other words, if you don't have problems now, there's no particular reason to do anything.

But there's another frequent problem with laptops: dual GPUs. That is very likely to cause conflicts, and in that case you need to disable the integrated GPU. Dual GPUs is fine for simple applications that just send data in a downstream flow - but Photoshop uses the GPU for actual processing, and the result returned to Photoshop for further processing. It goes both ways. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html

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