LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Well, yes and no.Originally Posted by kalniel
Currently, the biggest single performance limiter for heavy Photoshop use is memory bandwidth. Unfortunately, that's hard as hell to add.
But yes, up to a point, RAM and disk space are important but, up to a point, so is processor power, and cores. The biggest relevance of cores is not so much in using Photoshop per se, but in workflow. A quad core can have a significant effect if you're trying to use Photoshop while you've got something processor intensive going on in the background, such as Bridge processing RAW files in the background. But, even then, you still hit the memory bandwidth issue in many situations.
In terms of tuning for Photoshop, I'd say there are several things to aim for :-
- a 64-bit chip ..... though just about any new chip will be
- Vista 64-bit
- a true 64-bit mobo, with support for 8GB of RAM or more
- given the above, 6GB or 8GB or RAM
- minimum two, preferably three HDs (one dedicated to Photoshop scratch disk use
- careful setup and configuration.
BUT if your editing BIG images, the above will pay off far more than if you're doing simple operations to small shots from a typical point-and-shoot.
So while the above sort of focus is worth it for a heavy Photoshop user, it isn't (IMHO) worth it if it's just a PC the average home user edits a few snapshots on .... not that the typical snapshot-editing home user would have (or want) Photoshop anyway.
Photoshop is not especially processor intensive in most of it's operations. Mostly, you're moving big files around, hence the importance of memory bandwidth, but most Photoshop operations perform relatively little mathematical operations on them. And yes, I agree, if looking for somewhere to spend money on a Photoshop PC, look after RAM (3GB on a 32-bit OS, probably 6GB on a 64-bit system) and several disk drives. They'll do more good, most of the time, than a Quad will over a Dual.
Reply With Quote
SCAN.care@HEXUS
