Which video card do you use?

[John C Murphy]

I am planning to upgrade my PC in order make Photoshop work better (ie, faster).

For those that know: what video card does your computer have in it, and how well does it work for you?

[paulr]

photoshop performance isn't determined by the video card. any card that gives you the number of pixels at the bit depth you need will work. memory, storage size, disk speed, processor speed, and system bandwidth will all speed up ps.

[John_4185]

NVIDIA GeForce FX

FWIW, the best way to speed up photoshop is to add two or three more physical drives (not partitions) and distribute your scratch and source files across them. Next is to add more physical RAM and a faster CPU. There are grave doubts that adding Video RAM is particularly helpful to PS.

[j.e.simmons]

I agree with John. Get the scratch and source files on different drives. Then add RAM.
juan

[Ted Harris]

Finally, keep in mind that you will also need to upgrade to CS 2 (if you have not already done so) in order to 'break' the 2 GB RAM barrier; of course this will also mean a 64 bit CPU in order to address more than 2 GB of RAM. I don't want to satart an OS X v. Windows war (especially now that OS X as we now know it may be something of a dead end as Apple is swithcing to an Intel chip) BUT if you are buying now and going all the way toward the top end you should look closely at the costs of a Mac G5 based machine v. a Windows machine.

[John_4185]

Oh, Ted... first, there are so many Ifs Ands and Buts regarding breaking the 1.2GB barrier that it's not worth pursuing right now. Second, OSX is not going away just because it's being ported to an Intel chip. It will still be BSD Unix with the neXt interface over it.

[Eric Rose]

Now if I could just get my PS to work on my Mandriva (formally Mandrake Linux) box. I would be in heaven.

[Ed Richards]

Video cards do matter if your is so old that it does have enough ram to handle the images and the buffers. If the card is relatively new, the most important thing is to get the most recent driver from the manufacturer's WWW site. I was surprised at how much difference updating the driver made.

[Mike Cockerham]

If your upgrading anyway, why not go for a dual monitor card. While it is true the video card will not speedup Photoshop using two monitors is very nice. Also I am sure that Photoshop is not the only thing you use your pc for anyway. I also do video editing so two monitors makes life easier.

Mike

[Ted Harris]

JJ - 0f course OSX as we know it is not going away and I for one intend to hold onto my current G5 for at least another year and hopefully two. I hope your reference to the '1.2 GB barrier' was a typo (and we all know I KNOW about typos) as the barrier is 2 GB. Further on that issue, what ifs and buts? I have 5 GB of RAM, am running CS2 with 3.5 GB of RAM dedicated to same and not a single problem .... been running this way since I got the G5 in February. Manipulating large files is much much faster and the machine never gags when working with a 1 GB image.

I porbably wasn't strong enough but I would clearly recommend tht anyone making a new ourchase now, looking for a full 64 bit architecture, basing the decision on using Photoshop, etc. ..... look very hard at Macintosh if they are not already there. I stopped fighting the battle around here as I seem to have won. Our network now consists of the G5,a mini, an iBook, a Powerbook and a very very ancient 'white box' PC. The PC really doesn't serve any useful purpose as two of the Macs also run Virtual PC.

[John_4185]

Whatever works for a person works. That's all that's needed.

At work we have a fairly nice lab, including two dual processor G5s with 5gb of RAM and dual fixed discs and CS and the 23" monitor and also the usual 'buncha wintels' (around thirty). I don't know which version of the OS the G5s have since they were set up by someone else. I just use the things. I can give CS all the RAM I like, but a single process does not use more than 1.8gb. The virtue of all that RAM is that other executable s reside in memory at the same time. Maybe CS2 uses multiple separate processes that communicate among each other. Dunno, but there are a couple extra ~temporary executables... possibly just binary represented data structures (an old trick.)

That said, I use a well endowed Gateway because that's what's on my desk and life is just fine.

The Real Rest of Us will benefit when vendors finally go back to cutting real code, and inline assembler and machine code for the spendy routines. THAT will increase performance by the legendary magnitude, but it might not come about in my lifetime.