I am going through the specs of a new build for a friend. The main use will be web, email, photos, watching movies and kids homework/office stuff. Any gaming will be, I understand, limited to online stuff. However, the friend did mention the potential to use Photoshop in the future (home photo editing only, not professionally). He is moving from an old Mac (first version of OSX) and can't justify the spend on another Mac for the usage. I am looking at an i3 2100 CPU, 4GB RAM and utilising the on-chip GPU at a resolution of 1920x1080 but need some advice. Is Photoshop more dependent on CPU, GPU or RAM? Or is it more complicated than that? If I add a discrete GPU to the build, what would be the most cost effective choice? All thoughts and advice appreciated.
For such use the Photoshop doesn't REALLY have any special requirements. I'd say it's CPU-intensive more than anything and ofcourse you can never have too much memory. But for editing the holiday shots.. Yeah I'd say they will be happy with the i3 2100 + 4 GB you specced.
What about GPU? Would the on board HD Graphics 2000 be fine for Photoshop? Looking at various websites, they all talk about the CPU performance in Photoshop with no mention of the GPU. How relevant is the GPU to Photoshop? Would HD Graphics 2000 drive a full HD movie?
New Photoshop(s) use GPU for something, but again for such use it isn't going to make a difference. As for video, I've understood that HD-video playback is pretty much what integrated GPUs are made for. Shouldn't cause any problems.
i'd largely agree with this... (for co-processing) Okay, there are some processes (both within it & as 3rd party plugins) which can be accelerated by using a CUDA (nVidia) card, but you'd have to have something of a specialist use to notice anything. Then at some point (poss CS6) they'll add OpenCL which should be as quick as, if not quicker than, CUDA & 'can' work on any gfx card/onboard chip that has OpenCL enabled drivers &/or DirectCompute (Microsoft's co-processing thing). (for using it) Lots of it uses OpenGL though to accelerate things visually - but this can use any card/onboard thing & a low end card/decent onboard solution would suffice. Otherwise, two things that aren't clear from the OP are - 1. What sized images are going to be processed/what level of processing & will it be multi-tasking whilst editing? Well 8GB does make a difference with Adobe stuff & as (at least) CS5 uses a %age of available memory then the less you have in total, the lower it can use & the more pagefile use can occur. 2. & what is the online gaming? Well, if it's WOW or something then a half decent discrete gfx card would be beneficial just for that.
1. This will be home stuff from a non-professional level camera. As he used to design greeting cards on a Mac, he still thinks that Photoshop is the only photo editing software available. I am still trying to tell him that Photoshop is an overkill for kids birthday photo's and it will cost him an arm and a leg for the PC (his previous company used to pay for it, not any more). 2. By online gaming I meant kids browser flash games, not WoW or any games that require installing to the hard drive. I am going to convince him to go without a discrete GPU for now as it will keep the total build, including O/S, Office, monitor and all in one printer, down to around the £700 mark. He can always add one later if he gets into FPS's. Cheers for your help, +rep to you both.
I know its a bit late, But photoshopping will be the most resource happy task he will be doing. And if im going to be honest, I get on fine at work using photoshop with a Pentium D @ 2.4Ghz, 2GB Ram and a cheap Graphics Card. The spec you have suggested is going to breeze through whatever he throws at it. 4GB ram will be plenty even if you load up 50 or 60 photos.
From what I've heard the new cs5 supports hardware acceleration so larger scale stuff could see a boost from a gpu, but can't see it needing very much. From adobe site "Accelerate your workflow with fast performance on 64-bit Windows® and Mac hardware systems, smoother interactions thanks to more GPU-accelerated features, and dozens of time-savers requested by Photoshop users." Sadly, it doesn't give any details about what type of GPU acceleration, I thought at one point it supported CUDA or w/e it is from Nvidia.
it uses the gpu to do the 3d rendering features, and also for some of the 2d imaging effects like vanishing point. it gives you the option to use opengl or raytracing engines. there are some 3rd party plugins that i believe use cuda to some degree, but not the vanilla photoshop itself. for amatuer home use he might look at photoshop elements instead. its a stripped down version geared towards home users for a fraction of the cost of photoshop cs5.
