I was wondering if photography work depends mostly on cpu or gpu? That way i can decide between the 2014 or quad 2012 mac.
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Cpu vs gpu
- Thread starter BiteDisAppleD
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I plan on using light room and photo shop about 2 - 3 days each week. While for video editing probably once a month.
With Aperture and the upcoming Photos app the gpu is used extensively. Also, Pixelmator is almost exclusively gpu-driven It is a speed demon, even on the new 1.4 gHz Mini. Most of the Nik suite is also gpu-intensive.
It's the other way around. An ssd makes everything faster if you have enough memory.
That's not what you said earlier. You said an SSD was most important, which isn't true. RAM is most important to Photoshop.
And unfortunately an SSD has no effect on CPU speed, GPU speed or RAM. Sure programs load faster and feels snappier, but the computer itself is limited by the above. So it goes without saying that the computer is only as fast the CPU and GPU and any RAM bottlenecks that may exist.
Photoshop runs fine on a mba with 4gb and a pcie ssd. It does not run as fine on a mac mini with 8gb and an hdd. Also an ssd makes startup faster and everything more responsive.
It wouldn't run fine for me. For some projects, 16 GB of RAM is barely enough. I wouldn't even consider a mba for photoshop.
My point was that an ssd brings greater and more universal benefits than a ram upgrade.
Have you actually tried photoshop on a current mba? I get the feeling you haven't and your opinion is based on assumptions.
I just can't agree with this. I agree 100% that the SSD gives the perception of snappiness: programs load faster (because the OS is basically a program it also loads faster. I would have a hard time going back full time to a spinner for boot/application disk or even some of my data drives.
But if there truly is a RAM bottleneck, an SSD is a poor and expensive way to deal with it.
My point was that an ssd brings greater and more universal benefits than a ram upgrade.
Have you actually tried photoshop on a current mba? I get the feeling you haven't and your opinion is based on assumptions.
Why would I try it? It's totally inappropriate for my use.
An SSD does NOT bring greater and more universal benefits to Photoshop than a RAM upgrade. It speeds up loading, and helps if you don't have the RAM you should have. Big whoop. Anyone who needs more RAM for photoshop, and chooses a SSD upgrade instead, is a fool.
I have same question recently. About video, rendering 3D CG motion and video from camera, I mean rendering not encoding or decoding, comparing 3d with camera video, are they different on usage of cpu and gpu? thanks
Wrong, Disk access is most important in PS, especially if you have more than 1 history level. PS writes every brush stroke to disk... So the 2.5 inch 5400rpm drive always destroys any potential Photoshop performance.
I'd rather do large files in PS on my old emulated PPC CS1 on a Core2duo with 4GB and 7200rpm Barracuda than on my i5 16GB mini with CS5 and stock drive.
And for video, I would say disk access is pretty important too. Skipping through clips can be horrible on a slow drive.
GPU is irrelevant, especially mini-GPU's. HD3000:HD4000:Iris:GTX780ti (or some other relevant GPU card) is like 2:3:4:20
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No, you're wrong. Those history levels will be in RAM, unless you don't have the amount of RAM you should have.
Lightroom is CPU-dependent. No GPU acceleration at all. If you're applying changes to a batch of photos, or importing/exporting, more cores is better.
A quad-core will import and process MUCH faster than a dual core. But, LR is rather unoptimized, and takes twice as long to import as Aperture... so I'm looking forward to seeing what new GPU-accelerated stuff awaits in Apple's new Photos app and API's.
A quad-core will import and process MUCH faster than a dual core. But, LR is rather unoptimized, and takes twice as long to import as Aperture... so I'm looking forward to seeing what new GPU-accelerated stuff awaits in Apple's new Photos app and API's.
Then this beaviour changed. CS1 writes every action to disk. Which is more than logical. I run a ramdisk with 4gb for scratch. Ps is faster with ram disk and less normal ram than with all ram regular.
