6 Replies Latest reply: Dec 24, 2011 7:24 AM by Noel Carboni RSS

    Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?

    TomBrooklyn Community Member

      Windows 7 Pro 64bit

       

      Does Photoshop benefit much from an Intel Sandy Bridge I2500K CPU computer having a video card?

       

      The Sandy Bridge CPU, of course, has greatly improved on-board graphics compared to prior incarnations of Intel's CPUs.

       

      If a video card is useful for PS, how powerful ought it be to achieve a good cost/benefit ratio, or which one is recommended? (the so-called sweet spot of price and performance)

       

      Does it matter whether it's an AMD or NVidia type?

        • 1. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
          Silent785

          It doesn't matter if you buy an AMD or Nvidia card but the best thing to do is buy a good one. I just buy gaming cards(coz they're mostly good ones), atm I have an old card(Radeon HD4850) and I have advanced OpenGL drawing enabled. I don't think Photoshop requires a very strong card, mid-end cards should suffice(like a 5770). Mid-end cards aren't that expensive(around 100 euros).

          • 2. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
            Mylenium CommunityMVP

            Depends on what you do and whether you are actually dependent on any of the fancies like canvas rotation, cute overlay color pickers, brush overlays or using the 3D features. Sweet spot? Don't think so. Even many cards from the budget tray will suffice as long as they work at all and do not have driver issues. You could buy a 250 Euro card that is useless due to some driver or configuration glitch and a 40 Euro card might work splendidly, if you get my meaning... I use an GeForce GTX 285 and it works just fine. Do a little digging on the forums what cards otehr users use... Noel Carboni seems quite well informed on anything AMD/ ATI for instance...

             

            Mylenium

            • 3. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
              Noel Carboni Community Member

              Do either of you two (Silent785 or Mylenium) have personal experience with a Sandy Bridge integrated GPU?  Just wondering.

               

              I have not evaluated a Sandy Bridge GPU myself.

               

              TomBrooklyn wrote:

               


              If a video card is useful for PS, how powerful ought it be to achieve a good cost/benefit ratio, or which one is recommended? (the so-called sweet spot of price and performance)

               

              Does it matter whether it's an AMD or NVidia type?

               

              I've found that you want a video card that scores at least 500 on this benchmark for best Photoshop performance, ideally 1000 or more:

               

              http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

               

              The specific card I'd recommend right now today is a VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 6670 1 GB GDDR5, because it's a great compromise between quiet/low power operation and high rendering speed.

               

              As an OpenGL developer of 2D graphics software myself, I can tell you that in my experience ATI makes the best structured, most stable display drivers (and are least likely to break something with a new release), followed fairly closely by nVidia.  Intel has been a distant third, but one can imagine that if they're integrating GPUs on their processors now that they might better-fund a development team to make their OpenGL implementations more solid.

               

              -Noel

              • 4. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
                Trevor.Dennis Community Member

                I wonder if future versions of Photoshop might make use of specific GPUs for heavy lifting like Premiere Pro does with its Mercury Playback Engine.  If that ever was to be the case, then you would need an nVidia card (as opposed to Radeon).  Note that you don't necessarily need one of the very expensive cards on the Adobe Aproved List as lesser nVidia cards can be made to work).  This senario is probably unlikely (as Premiere Pro is so much more demanding on hardware than Photoshop) but I bet a good percentage of the posters on this forum have DSLR cameras that do great video, so might find themselves investing in Premiere Pro in the future.  It would be a pity to have to junk a fairly new graphics card if a person were to go that way.

                 

                Another posibility is that the next version of Premiere Elements might use MPE, and Photoshop CS6 might come packaged with Premiere Elements. 

                 

                LOL  I speak from experience as I have a Radion 4850 2Gb that works great for Photoshop, but won't do MPE.

                • 5. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
                  Bill Hunt CommunityMVP

                  One of the issues, historically, with Intel GPU's has been a lack of driver support. That seldom creates a problem for the average person doing general computing, word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, Web browsing, etc., but can be a big problem with programs like PS, After Effects or PrPro.

                   

                  Will Sandybridge driver support be better? I think that only time will tell. Until I see Intel doing driver updates on a nearly monthly basis, I'll stick with my nVidias (or AMD/ATI, if I had one).

                   

                  Good luck,

                   

                  Hunt

                  • 6. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
                    Noel Carboni Community Member

                    Good point, Trevor.  I should mention that Mercury isn't supported by ATI when I recommend that brand in the future.

                     

                    OpenCL is supposed to fix the problem with apps that want GPU acceleration being tied to one vendor.  I would imagine that future Adobe development should try to go that way, but that's just speculation.  I hope so; given the teraflop power available from modern GPUs, it would be awfully nice if some of the compute-intensive stuff in Photoshop could be run on the GPU.  We already see impressive acceleration in the stuff it DOES do over there.

                     

                    I saw a while back that Capture 1 uses OpenCL to put raw file conversion logic on the GPU, and it's supposed to be very fast.  I don't know much more than that about it though; on my list of things to do is to go research it some time to see what it supports and how well people say it works.

                     

                    -Noel

                    • 7. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
                      TomBrooklyn Community Member

                      Thanks for all the input.

                      Noel Carboni wrote:

                      I've found that you want a video card that scores at least 500 on this benchmark for best Photoshop performance, ideally 1000 or more:

                      http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

                       

                      Regarding this Benchmark, does it actually have any predictive abilities about performance in Photoshop?     It mentions only  "computing activities such as PC gaming, video editing and software development."   

                      • 8. Re: Is a Video Card Much Better Than Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics?
                        Noel Carboni Community Member

                        I doubt there's anything Photoshop-specific in the benchmark.  But it does measure OpenGL rendering performance.

                         

                        I've personally used Photoshop on many different systems, some of which rated below 500 and some of which rated above 500.  It seemed to me Photoshop becomes noticeably less interactive on the machines where the display adapter scores below 500.  Above that and I didn't notice.  I used a machine every day for a few years (PS CS4 and CS5) that rated at something like 560 and it was quite acceptable.  500 is just a rough rule of thumb.

                         

                        Since Photoshop uses CPU as well as the GPU, you'll find the CPU speed matters too - as usual the more the better.  Fast, new processors will definitely help, as will a high performance disk subsystem.

                         

                        Keep in mind Photoshop is not the only application that uses the GPU any more... Your web browser very likely will give you a better experience with a faster GPU, as a lot of rendering is now farmed out to the video card (e.g., with IE9).

                         

                        -Noel