Photoshop and graphics cards

Hardware Hub GPU
1

I asked over at inbox.exe and got a limited response, maybe I will get better response in this forum... 

 

Onto my question, I am in the market for a laptop and want to use photoshop on it, (cs6, and I have used it very little) I wish to know whether a graphics card makes a difference for photoshop, I also heard that it is accelerated using openGL (or was it CL?) which is muich better on AMD cards, yes? also do I even need to have a graphics card or was I just lied to and would a cpu only setup be fine?

2

I dont know if photoshop takes advantage of cuda or opencl better but yes putting a good cpu and a good graphics card should speed up photoshop a lot compaired to just a cpu alone.  I am also no expert on adobe products so hopefully someone else will help.

3

GPU's do improve photoshops performance but you only notice it with a good GPU. In my opinion I think it's better to invest more money into the CPU only if the sole purpose of the laptop is for ps and not gaming.

4

My ASUS G71 doesn't do to bad in Photoshop. It only has a Core 2 Duo and 6Gb of DDR2 but the acceleration I get with my GTX 260m makes it run pretty smoothly.

5

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314147

From what I have read somthing like this would work good for photoshop hopfully someone can tell you weather amd or nvidia is the way to go for cs6 

 

6

I'm kind of impressed with price on that laptop. Granted i'm not fond of Windows 8 it seems like a good buy.

7

no difinitive answer yet, just gonna use this to bump... anyone able to recommend (dare i say) an ultrabook?

8

Hmm well most mid to high range graphics should do the job just fine when it comes to rendering.

But in terms of rendering big textures, well it depends.

What format are you exporting in, how big is the texture.

Generally people use DDS for game mods etc currently, the old way was TGA.

But what is also more important is how much ram you're using, you can specify this in photoshop.

I have a 2X4GB GEIL 1866 mhz DDR3 setup and another spare 4GB DDR3 ram stick, more or less rated the same.

I use a lot so this way I can open and edit multiple textures at the same time.;)

9

honestly i've done quite a bit of photoshop on multiple machines, and i cannot tell a difference, everything gets done in a fraction of a second regardless of if i'm on a 8320/7870 or a core 2 duo/intel gma 950

10

cs6 isnt opencl accelerated, i think its only the new adobe creative cloud stuff that is.

It is opengl accelerated so you get super smooth panning / zooming of the workspace even on pretty low end nvidia and ati cards.

rather annoyingly you will find awesome videos online of apu opencl demonstrations in premiere / photoshop which *seem* too be running on v6 from amd and a couple of other sources but adobe decided not to implement on the final release.

I dont know why - maybe it just wasnt stable at that point in time or maybe because adobe were being arseholes.

Pretty much everything in photoshop is multithreaded so the more cores the better.