Hi Chedd !
My current wedding video is in post-production with over 2,000 photos and 1,000 video clips. So my question to you is: How many photographs do you take during a typical wedding ? If your answer is more than 100 photos per wedding, then you need to think seriously to upgrading your MBP choice to include a better GPU. The Adobe application line takes advantage of the CUDA cores in the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M.
Next you should have at least two hard drives backing up your work. Go to OWC to get their USB3 (FW800,USB2) docking cradles (NewerTech Voyager <$90).
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock
All you need then is to drop in a raw hard drive into each and backup. I have found this to be a very reasonable cost-effective storage.
Disclaimer: I do not work of OWC, but I do buy/use their products.
You are mostly incorrect regarding CUDA. It's used in After Effects for accelerating raytraced functions. It's used in Premiere for a few things. The OP doesn't mention dealing with any video editing. OpenCL is used. For that purpose, the 2012 isn't any faster than the 2011 15" models. The 13" and Air don't necessarily support some of it, but those are features the OP may never use. The OpenGL frameworks theoretically speed up drawing in photoshop. It won't make a huge difference. I've used it on a mac pro with the 5770. I've used it on my macbook pro with the 6750m 1GB version. Even slow gpus can draw reasonably fast there. Please be a little more careful when offering such advice. The OP here is a college student, so they are likely on a budget. Even the 2011 15" is significantly faster than the Air, but looking at this relative to the OP's machine, I suspect he's taking a big hit due to 4GB of ram + HDD for scratch disks, especially with the way spotlight slows them down.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/979969
MGE is new to Photoshop CS6, and uses both the OpenGL and OpenCL frameworks. It does not use the proprietary CUDA framework from nVidia.
Hi! I take between 1,000-2,000 photos every event. I did not know that about the Adobe/NVIDIA connection. I really wanted the MBA, but now the two things that worry me the most about it are the CPU and GPU. In reality the applications I use work fine on my computer (with the exception of a few lags in Lightroom 4), I was just looking for something a little smoother/better than what I had and not necessarily the best. BTW, thank you for your help!
There isn't one. Note my reference. This forum can be a fire hydrant of misinformation at times
. When you first load a ton of photos into lightroom, it will go through some processing. Photoshop and lightroom are pretty ram heavy. If you note the current recommendations for CS6, 8GB is recommended. I find this to be slightly on the light side when dealing with many files or large ones. Lightroom is a bit memory heavy too, although I haven't used it in a while so I can't really comment exactly how much it takes advantage of this.
The current MBA is significantly faster. I'd suggest the ivy bridge one specifically (not a refurb sandy). It supports OpenCL 1.1, unfortunately not 1.2. I haven't seen any signs of photoshop leveraging it for OpenCL acceleration, yet this is limited to lighting effects, liquify, iris blur, and possibly a few other things. They still run faster on the newer cpus. They're ridiculously fast if they can run on the gpu. If you order from Apple, they don't charge a restocking fee. I'd suggest you order the Air you want. I really suggest the 8GB ram model if possible. If it's laggy, you can return it without a loss. I just think others are making your paranoid.
As for me, I've dealt with enormous print comps with dozens of layers on much older hardware. I've dealt with a lot of rendering too. During the G4/G5 era, I used to severely limit history, turn off thumbnails on every tool, use a dedicated scratch disk, tune the ram allocation and cache levels, disable spotlight (this was in Tiger) to any directory where it placed scratch disks, and a list of other things. Some of those still boost performance. If you have disk warrior it helps too for clearing up quirky file system issues, but I don't really suggest buying it today.
If you're on Core2duo hardware, I suspect your issues are more than just cpu. If you're on an old HDD, it writes things to a scratch disk and spotlight is constantly watching. Just disabling most of the system area stuff in spotlight takes care of most of that. If you're below 8GB of ram, that can be a huge bottleneck. The thumnbails + not using histogram or navigator palettes is more about minimizing disk activity than anything.
If you get a new Air, I doubt you'll have to do any of that. The quad models are still faster, including Sandy Bridge. I just don't think it's a guarantee that you will need these, and it annoys me every time someone mentions the gpu. Photoshop mainly cares about OpenGL version supported, OpenCL version supported if you want those accelerations, and amount of available vram. Only the 8GB air meets the recommendation of 512MB of vram. The up charge on the Air for 8GB is annoying, so only you can decide if that's worth it in the end, but I would guess that is one of your current bottlenecks.
