Best card for Photoshop ?

H

hometech99

Newcomer
sorry if im in the wrong forum- so please spare the flames !

ive been reading tons about pipelines, core speeds, 128mb, 256mb, etc.

what i want to do is Photoshop.

I am building an intel 2.8C on Asus p4c800-e. asetek waterchill cooler and Swiftech mw50 VGU block ( if need be).

does having 256MB vs. 128mb of vram benefit photoshop?

as far as speed, will photoshop see any benefit of say,
an ati 9800 pro, or will a 9200 do?

thanks and best regards
stu
 
If photoshop is all you are going to be doing, spend less on the video card and stick that money for a better processor and more ram.

Photoshop is video card independent. That means, that it uses none of the fancy built-in thingamajigs in these expensive cards anyway.

My advice: pick up something with excellent 2d... a 8500 - 9200 would be fine, or a Matrox card of some sort.
 
get a nice 9500pro if u can find them or a 9600pro. About 150$ for the card and invet the rest in ram or a faster cpu . Dunno if photo shop can use dual cpus but if it can get a dual cpu set up
 
If all you're doing is photoshopping, any old $50 card will do.

Use the other $100 to buy as much ram as you can.
 
Well, any old card with excellent signal quality. Look into a Radeon 9000 or 9200, or a 9000 Pro if you'll be gaming a bit. You might consider a GF4MX or FX5200 if you're going to want dual displays in Win2K with gaming on the side.

And you can't go wrong with Matrox for 2D apps, though you'll pay a little more than a functionally-comparable ATi or nVidia card.
 
I thought the newer 3DLabs cards (P10 ?) provided some kind of hardware acceleration for some photoshop operations.

Is that not the case ?
 
Creative has some cards based on P9 (or something like that), which do have apps using a GPU for 2D photo editing. I'm not sure if this includes the Photoshop though...
 
hometech99 said:
what i want to do is Photoshop.
Click to expand...

A few years ago, there were two manufacturers worth considering for serious 2D work; they were Number Nine and Matrox. Number Nine is no more. Guess where that leaves you? ;)

I would look into Matrox' latest announcement, the P-series cards. P650 is the slower and has "only" support for two monitors, but is passively cooled and cheap for a Matrox; P750 is faster (in 3D, probably no real difference in 2D) and has support for three monitors but is fan-cooled and more expensive.

The special "photo" features of that Creative 3Dlabs-based card were AFAICR related to stitching, combining several photographs making a larger one. I think it used shaders to speed up this operation. A specialty field, one can say :)
 
You need a cheap card with the best 2D quality possible.
IIRC get a Radeon 9000 64MB for $50. It has a 400MHz integrated DACs with 10-bit per channel palette
 
Hehe ... and some may want you to belive that Creative's new child is the best for you ...

Remember their 3DLabs reincarnation that is "Digital Camera Optimised" ?

Well , I'll wait until they'll make an "Washing Machine Optimised" one ...

On a serious matter as this I'll always recomend a Matrox solution based on the quality they offer . Based on the price .... try an ATi Radeon 9600 Pro and you'll be very happy .
 
I must also vote for the P650, you actually seem to be in Matrox's target demographic. ;)

Gigacolor may be useful to you, and of course the excellent 2D Quality.
 
so far, Parhelia or Px50 series from Matrox are the only ones providing real 30 bit color palette on display level with Photoshop plugin. This is the one of only things that no one else can't provide. PLUS, with parhelia and 3 displays, there's seriously more room to work on with your images.


Novdid, Gnep and Keegdsb: MURCers Hit Hard! ;)

did you guys notice that G-series are alive?? ;) though the maker is now Bitboys and numbering starts from G10, but still... :)
 
David G. said:
....
Remember their 3DLabs reincarnation that is "Digital Camera Optimised" ?

Well , I'll wait until they'll make an "Washing Machine Optimised" one ...
Click to expand...

Heh...;) Sort of like Intel's clever "speed up the Internet with this new cpu" advertising....*chuckle* (was it "Netburst"...?)

The daddy of them all, of course, is HYPE-rthreading...;) Or, "How to take the relatively inefficient P4 architecture, add voltage, add circuitry, raise temps, all for a limited, but sometimes negative, performance increase which only occurs running multithreaded software."
 
WaltC said:
Heh...;) Sort of like Intel's clever "speed up the Internet with this new cpu" advertising....*chuckle* (was it "Netburst"...?)
Click to expand...
Nope, that was the SSE (or then iSSE) enabled Pentium III (or Pentium!!!), of course with all later processors having this functionality, they all speed up the Internet. ;)

WaltC said:
The daddy of them all, of course, is HYPE-rthreading...;) Or, "How to take the relatively inefficient P4 architecture, add voltage, add circuitry, raise temps, all for a limited, but sometimes negative, performance increase which only occurs running multithreaded software."
Click to expand...
some facts:

-> no increase of the core voltage at the same frequency
-> no added circuitry, as Jackson has been present since day one
-> higher temps are a function of the higher utilization of the functional units

I don't know why some people spin HT as a negative thing. Higher performance at the same frequency - wasn't that what many people asked for after NetBurst's lowered IPC (on some things, compared to the previous P6 architecture) became apparent? And you can even turn it off should you chose to use an HT-enabled processor with an SMT-unaware OS and/or software that suffers from negative effects of the ressource sharing.

cu

incurable
 
WaltC said:
The daddy of them all, of course, is HYPE-rthreading...;) Or, "How to take the relatively inefficient P4 architecture, add voltage, add circuitry, raise temps, all for a limited, but sometimes negative, performance increase which only occurs running multithreaded software."
Click to expand...

What about running more than one thing at once? I have many things that run in the background during games. Wouldnt it speed it up? Especially when I alt+tab to talk to someone who IM'ed me?
 
What I need is a multi-threaded hard drive. When compiling HT doesn't get a chance to let me do other stuff because the hard drive is being hammered.
 
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