Video Card helpful for Photoshop? 2

[lenshead]

How much and what kind of improvement will a video card upgrade produce for Photoshop work? Better image quality, faster file handling etc? Thanks- please be as specific as you can.

John

 

[paparazi]

Practically none! Photoshop is a 2D application and so is very undemanding on the GPU and it's associated memory, as long as you have a resonable quality 32mb or above AGP/PCIe card you will see little or no improvement.

Photoshop is all about memory amount, CPU speed, motherboard chipset and hard drive performance.

Admitadley some cards can be a little crisper, ATI and Matrox generally are noted for good image quality but the differances are finite.

Photoshop can take advantage of dual core CPU's so they can be advantagous

Post back with your specs and we will advise on any bottle necks in your setup.
Martin



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[felixc]

If there's anything you want to do to get a good video for Photoshop, it is to get a video calibration tool. This is something that you will put in front of your monitor and that will adjust the video card parameters like brightness contrast and gamma, to make what you see in your monitor closer to what you will get when you want to print your pictures.

Other than that, as paparazi said, Photoshop isn't very demanding on the video card.

 

[lenshead]

My PC at home has Windows XP, Pentium IV 2.8 Ghz set up for hyper threading and about a gig of RAM. The PC's at work are older with Windows 2000, 1.7Ghz Pentiums, gig of RAM. They are really dogs and I'm looking to pep them up as cheaply as possible. We do have a good colorimeter and software from Monaco to calibrate our Lacie Monitors. Monitors are reasonably close to printer output and are uniform one to another. We are running CS2 Photoshop. PS- not to get too far off topic, but my home PC (2.8, XP) is crashing frequently. Microsoft reports it as a driver error, but nothing more specific. Any forum for this kind of issue? How about some kind of activeX diagnostic tool online? Thanks again for your responses.

Lenshead

 

[paparazi]

lenshead
As you can tell by my name I too am a professional photographer but with some PC building knowledge.

There is calibration with CS2, and also built into both Nvidia and ATI control panels (drivers)

Has it been over 18months since a clean install on your home machine? if so it might be advantageous just to reformat and re-install everything with the latest drivers etc
This way you eliminate software so any further issues would be hardware related, besides it makes good sense to re-install at least once every 18months or so.

Martin

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