Photoshop, Illustrator

[Anastasiya338354964ia8]

Good afternoon. I'm going to buy a laptop to use Photoshop and Illustrator. What are the necessary laptop parameters for these programs? With a powerful processor, is the integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics card enough?

[jane-e]

@Anastasiya338354964ia8 

Photoshop Recommended System Requirements

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.html

GPU FAQs

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cc-gpu-card-faq.html

Illustrator System Requirements

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/system-requirements.html#ai-on-the-desktop

Be sure to pay attention to the GPU that needs Direct X 12 PLUS Feature Level 12. The feature level is required for current versions of Photoshop.

Jane

[D Fosse]

512 GB system drive is not enough. 1TB should be minimum, You'll need a lot of free disk space for the Photoshop scratch disk. Advanced raster image editing requires huge amounts of memory, much more than any RAM you may have installed. So temporary working data are written to disk. With many big files open, you may need 500 GB and up just for the scratch disk.

The official system requirements are very unrealistic here.

The problem is that all your applications will dump all kinds of junk in your user account on the system drive - in addition to anything you store on the disk yourself. This will accumulate over time, and while it may work now, it's a problem waiting to happen. You'll also be very dependent on external drives before long.

The Intel Iris GPU is marginal. It may work and it may not. But ironically, it may be better than a laptop with a more powerful GPU and an integrated GPU in addition. Dual GPUs is always a potential problem with laptops. It works for simple applications that just send data one way downstream, but Photoshop uses the GPU for actual data processing. There can only be one GPU in that equation. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other.

All things considered, a laptop is not optimal for Photoshop. You'll need to look very carefully at the specs.

[Anastasiya338354964ia8]

thanks!

[Bojan Živković]

If you are looking for a laptop that can run Photoshop and Illustrator smoothly, you should consider the following specifications: 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD NVME, and a GPU of at least RTX 3060 or RTX 3060Ti. These are the most affordable DDR4 configurations that I can think of to last for a few years (hopefully).

[Anastasiya338354964ia8]

thank you very much )

[wildmercury]

In my unfortunate experience, no. My laptop with Itel Iris xe and 16Gb of RAM (Dell Inspiron 7506) bluescreens frequently with either PhotoShop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Illustrator or even lowly Fresco open for more than 10 minutes of work. I've been badgering Adobe support and Intel and Dell support for a year without resolution. So if I was picking a new laptop today, I'd definitely be going for one with a dedicated graphics card by nVidia.

[D Fosse]

Indeed - but the problem nowadays is that all laptops come with dual GPUs. That's almost a bigger problem than an underpowered integrated Intel GPU in itself. Dual GPUs is a blue screen waiting to happen, when running advanced applications like the CC apps.

I don't know who thought this was a great idea, but apparently it works in most of the consumer-grade apps that make up the bulk of what people use laptops for, so they're not getting too much complaints.