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rproulxmtl
Known Participant
August 26, 2012
Question

Max graphics card (PC) performance for PS-CS6?

  • August 26, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 20472 views

Photoshop CS6 makes extensive use of graphic card features such as OpenGL and OpenCL. Prices of graphic cards that have those features range from well under $100 to over $4000 for top of the line Pro cards.

If your system is only used for PS then there's no need to invest in features you don't need, such as those needed by video gamers. But you do want the best graphics card performance that PS can make use of.

Has anyone seen a test of various graphics cards to determine at what point additional graphics performance no longer improves PS performance? For example, does the card's clock speed effect PS performance? Does 2G of graphics card RAM offer any improvement over 1G (or 512MB)?

Thanks

R

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    2 replies

    D
    Des7
    Participating Frequently
    August 27, 2012

    Adding to what Noel said, I've never seen really stellar performance with any card with DDR3 onboard.  Get one with GDDR5, it runs at double the speed or more.  For example, you can get a GT440 with DDR3 or GDDR5.  Beyond that, the core speed difference and overall core count makes a surprisingly small difference.

    As far as driver issues, you will have them with AMD cards.  Their drivers are just awful.  They release soooo many unstable ones and they're so game-centric, they constantly have problems with Adobe products.  I'd go with Nvidia for sure.  I haven't seen specific photoshop acceleration numbers but the best overall performance vs price right now is the 550ti.  They're only like $120.

    As for the single purpose specialized cards, they're barely even worth it for Premiere let alone photoshop.  Firepro's are all around useless and Quadros have faster alternatives for 1/10th the price on every benchmark I've seen.  I think they're more for Autocad or something because they're not anywhere near worth the price for Adobe stuff.

    If you're on a budget though and you don't want to have to cross your fingers and hope your power supply can handle a 550ti, the high end GT440's are pretty nice.  It's your basic "I just want some GPU-acceleration" card.  They're like 1/3 the speed of the 550ti and are around $70-75.

    Noel Carboni
    Noel Carboni
    Legend
    August 27, 2012

    wizzerd144 wrote:

    As far as driver issues, you will have them with AMD cards.  Their drivers are just awful.

    Frankly, I disagree with that.  As on OpenGL developer I find the AMD/ATI drivers to be of better quality than nVidia's, generally speaking.  But the ATI installers aren't great, so sometimes you have to do things like remove an old version of the driver before installing a new one.

    If I were recommending a card right now for a Photoshop workstation with some future-proofness, I'd suggest one of these two:

    • VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 7750 - low power draw (doesn't require an additional power supply connection) and reasonably fast.  Roughtly $100.

    • VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 7850 - double the GPU compute power, and about double the price of the 7750.

    You really don't need an expensive workstation card.  Their drivers are often less mature than their "gamer" counterparts.

    -Noel

    T
    tmboyz
    Participant
    October 28, 2012

    I wouldn't say it if it wasn't correct. 

    I can only offer my entire career's software engineering experience.  For 35 years I have led teams of engineers and for a lot of it I was responsible for making their working environments productive in addition to producing products.  I know how software developers think and what kinds of shortcuts they tend to take.  I also learned a thing or two about how best to set up workstations so people can get a lot of work done.

    And it's common sense - system testing is of course going to be done most on default configurations.  Testers have to set things up again and again to test them, and they're going to take the defaults more often than not.

    Lastly, I participate a lot here on these forums, and I have picked up on what others see go wrong.  A fair number of people have reported unexpected problems - problems they really shouldn't have had, things like permissions issues -  by trying to move parts of their systems off to disks other than C:, perhaps because their SSD is too small to hold everything.

    Following the philosophies I put forth here myself - for example this one (Windows works best if everything's on C:) - I consistently put together high performance systems that are perfectly reliable and stable.  My T5500 I mentioned above is only getting reboots when Windows Updates require them.

    I've even written a couple of books on how best to set up Windows, and they're doing well.

    -Noel


    Wow! honestly, this is the first time in 12 yrs i really get to hear concrete information on how things work best in default! So simple, so obvious, I've never really gave it much thought, till now.

    This also seem to be the case with people and the world around us; many things left in default, are predictable.

    If not for my googling to check on the quadro, which i am planning on getting, i wouldnt have come to this page and read your commnets. Thanks! this is really something new for me.

    What tiltes are your books on windows?

    Noel Carboni
    Noel Carboni
    Legend
    August 27, 2012

    No, I haven't seen any kind of hard information on that.

    And just saying "graphics card performance that PS can make use of" isn't really enough.  Different cards might rate differently if you do a lot of painting, or a lot of 3D, or a lot of Liquify and Lighting Effects operations, etc.

    And not least of which is driver quality!  Two different GPU driver releases for the very same card can yield radically different performance.  It might be, for example, that Photoshop can't make use of OpenCL facilities at all on one release while it can on another (I've personally seen this happen).

    It seems to me it's about time that a modern Photoshop benchmark suite be created.  Now that brush strokes can actually be recorded in actions, it would be just a matter of recording some sequences that people can run on their systems, and maybe we can get some kind of objective information on what system components are better for doing Photoshop operations than others.  I've just been considering doing up such a benchmark.

    -Noel

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