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which is better for photoshop
- Thread starter Acorn
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Hmm, i'm not expert on this but at a guess i'd say the pro because it has a decidated graphics card.
hmm i wonder how accurate those benchmarks are. photoshop does indeed use more processor then graphics but everywhere ive looked say your better off with an nvidia accelerator. That test does show otherwise though. interesting indeed.
This is a typical point of confusion. Adobe had their previous "Mercury playback" branding. In photoshop they call it the mercury engine. While Premiere and some After Effects functions (mostly raytracing) remain on CUDA, photoshop is using OpenCL now. It has used OpenGL drawing options since CS4. Those also remain. In terms of OpenCL calculations, they are limited to lighting effect, iris blur, liquify, and perhaps a few other things. None of these will run on a gpu with less than 512MB of vram. 256 won't run many OpenCL functions, and when it comes to OpenGL drawing, just stick with any recent model gpu. In the case of your 2010 vs the Air, neither accelerates those functions. I don't think they were part of the test either.
http://barefeats.com/mbp12cp.html
See the things with the really long bars? Your 2010 can't run them. They have minimum requirements for vram and OpenCL version to be certified. Apple should have ditched 256MB gpus earlier though. They made them all the way into 2011, which is just ridiculous.
thanks thekey for the reply. so I guess it doesnt matter much what I choose. either seems a bad choice.
In theory it should. I just haven't seen this in practice, and it didn't seem to early on. This would be a good question for the Adobe forums. I wish I could give you a better answer. People get a little too hung up on the gpu though. The things that matter for this specific application in the context of Macs with set hardware are vram, OpenGL version supported, and OpenCL version supported (hd 4000 supports 1.1). Older ones are also dropped from the official supported list when their respective vendors drop them. In the case of Apple, Adobe usually supports things until Apple de-supports them at a software level.
No problem. The response I wrote earlier must have gotten lost, but neither is a bad choice. Let me put it this way. It could matter if you used those things constantly. Otherwise it's not that big of a deal. Liquify is often a very bad way to do things. People have used it since photoshop 6, but the parametric adjustment tools like warp, shear, etc. often render better. The other thing to note is that most people have the tendency to severely mess up the mesh, and that in itself creates a lot of problems. Sometimes it needs proper masking to be applied correctly, and the concept of mesh based items is that distortions should be distributed across them. If you've ever dealt with 3d modeling, topoiogy is a big deal there too. As for the other things, I haven't used lighting effects in ages. It's a silly dated effect, but some people still incorporate it. Iris blur is newer. It's extremely slow on the cpu, but do you really find yourself waiting for the things I mentioned to render? Beyond that is basic OpenGL stuff. Your machine shouldn't have trouble with that.
If you want a real notebook performance upgrade for the applications mentioned, you're looking at a 2011 or 2012 macbook pro. The Air is roughly a sidegrade for you with a slimmer form factor. As to performance, you have the 2010 now. If it's running fast enough, you have little to worry about when you switch to the Air. If you're too low on ram and hitting scratch disks, the Air with 8 + ssd will be noticeably faster.
if you are using CS extension of PS that involves some 3D rendering, then it may be worth to get a dedicated gfx card to do the job, otherwise, for touchups or color corrections, i doubt there is any noticeable difference in performance at all. like what some have posted, a higher spec'ed CPU would do the computations faster and would make a more significant difference.
The i5. I just paid $100 for the RAM upgrade, which I highly recommend, even though it takes longer to get the machine. A little extra processor boost doesn't help that much, but Photoshop gets cramped in only 4GB of RAM.
So do you think the i5 macBook Air 13 with 8GB of ram will be enough for moderate/heavy photoshop and illustrator work?
My 2010 MB Pro vs my 2012 MB Air
I just bought a 2012 13" MB Air with 2 Ghz i7, 8 GB RAM and 512 MB SSD and it purely kicks my 2010 15" MB Pro with 2.66 Ghz i7, 8 GB RAM and 7200 RPM 500 GB HDD. Kicks it's little aluminum but and is soooooo much easier to carry with me on the road when shooting images.
I travel with a Canon 1DIII, 5DIII, and 5DII plus G1X and a couple of G10's.
My MB Pro is relegated to desktop use now with a 27" Apple monitor.
My two cents.
I just bought a 2012 13" MB Air with 2 Ghz i7, 8 GB RAM and 512 MB SSD and it purely kicks my 2010 15" MB Pro with 2.66 Ghz i7, 8 GB RAM and 7200 RPM 500 GB HDD. Kicks it's little aluminum but and is soooooo much easier to carry with me on the road when shooting images.
I travel with a Canon 1DIII, 5DIII, and 5DII plus G1X and a couple of G10's.
My MB Pro is relegated to desktop use now with a 27" Apple monitor.
My two cents.
Heavy (professional?) Photoshop work on a 13" display?
I'm always baffled by people who want to do that.Heavy (professional?) Photoshop work on a 13" display?
I would pair it with a 27" Thunderbolt Display. Of dourse I wil not design on a 13" screen.... tsk
I've got the same MBP as wolfpuppies3 (apart from mine's got an SSD in it). I've also got an 11 inch 2012 i7 Air. I run Photoshop and Illustrator on both. I wouldn't say the Air kicks the MBP's ass, usage-wise the apps feel the same running on both. I don't use any of that filter rubbish do I can't say how that runs on the HD4000. The Adobe suite should run well on your proposed system, I agree with hooking it up to an external screen though.
I appreciate your input in both this and the other thread. I am not a buy new every 2-3 years kind of person and having a large media file of photos on a external, I want something that will serve me well over time.
I have narrowed it to:
Mac Air: i7/8gb/512
or
Mac Pro: i7/8gb/512
difference is $200 more for the Pro. I have to decide if the extra weight and size is worth the money for a built in optical drive, ethernet and NVIDIA.
Heavy (professional?) Photoshop work on a 13" display?
Im more baffled why people wouldn't assume an external monitor would come into play when one mentions Professional Photoshop work.
2sa
the choice may be easier than you thought. I use the external Apple Superdrive and the Thunderbolt to Gigabit ethernet adaptor with my Air. Rarely use either but have them if needed.
the choice may be easier than you thought. I use the external Apple Superdrive and the Thunderbolt to Gigabit ethernet adaptor with my Air. Rarely use either but have them if needed.
There is another choice and that is to see what the configuration of the 13" rMBP looks like when it is released.