Is a decent graphics card required for editing?

hobodan

hobodan

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Dan
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Hi again

I have been looking at desktop pc's to comfortably run lightroom 4 & elements & I just wondered if a decent graphics card is required for speedier use of these programs, or is it purely down to the processor & available System RAM?

I had initially thought of Saving for a nice big iMac with apature 3, but after trying out Lightroom 4 recently I realised I'd be very happy with that & a p.c if it is going to save me a few bob.

I have my eye on a HP 23inch monitor for around £170.. But it's choosing a desktop to go with it that's troubling me!
They have some very cheap in pcworld (£300-£400) , I just don't know if they are powerful enough to run the above mentioned programmes without slowing to a snails pace.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.
 
I am probably wrong buy I would say the processor and ram's the reason for the speed issue.

I am sure Neil will in a bit to clear things up.
 
I'm running Lightroom 3 on Windows 7 (both 64 bit), with an i5 processor and 8 Gigabytes of RAM. It works extremely well and that's with a pretty old graphics card.

All of the high-end graphics cards are pretty much designed for gaming, and the demands of a 'normal' application like Lightroom will be very low in comparison.

I wouldn't buy from PC World though. They don't sell great PC's and you'll find support to be pretty bad.

There are however lots of good online retailers, and I'd recommend CCL Computers, Novatech and even eBuyer are good these days.

However, for a really nice machine at a fair price, take a look at Chillblast. They are always well regarded and although you might pay a little more than what seems like a similar spec to a PC Word box, you'll have well chosen components in a balanced system.
 
The simple answer is no, you don't need a high performnce grapics card - almost anything will do. Having said that, £300-£400 isn't going to buy you much of a PC IMHO. You need to be looking at i5-2xxx processors and 8G of memory which are around £500 or so. The i5 has an integrated graphics chip so if you can find one that has a motherboard with video out, it will probably be fie.

Post here (or in the computer section) before you buy and there's a number of people who will give you a view as to whether what you are suggesting is good value.
 
Not for the editing but if youre running a high res 2560x1440 monitor youre gonna need a dual link dvi-d compatible card with a bit of oomph to run it
 
Thanks, I have just been looking at the chillblast website & reading some reviews; it seems you can get a very decent spec i5 for just under £500! Without monitor of course
 
You don't need a massive graphics card.

A fast quad core (i5 2500K) and about 8GB of RAM, DDR3 1600 would also be good, CS and Lightroom are one of the few places where more ram is better, although 16GB DDR3 can be had for about £80

At 1440p you do need a bit of oomph to drive the monitor
 
I have an older quad core intel 6600 whatever that is. I think 4gb of ram, a couple of decently quick hard drives and a mid range graphics card. Runs CS4 and lightroom with ease and no noticeable slow down. Video editing I think would be painful, but for photo editing it's more than enough.
 
If your budget allows get a solid state drive to install Windiws and your applications too makes a huge performance difference much more than what even a high end graphics card will.
 
remember photoshop will only use the scratch drive once it runs out of memory so if youre not using up all of your RAM an SSD may not help that much.

but initial loading etc will be much quicker.
 
neil_g said:
remember photoshop will only use the scratch drive once it runs out of memory so if youre not using up all of your RAM an SSD may not help that much.

but initial loading etc will be much quicker.
Click to expand...

That is true if you are just talking about processing but the read/write speeds of SSD's are incredible and more than worth it for a photographer. Quicker program loading speeds such as LR or PS and images load and save faster.
 
AESamuel said:
That is true if you are just talking about processing but the read/write speeds of SSD's are incredible and more than worth it for a photographer. Quicker program loading speeds such as LR or PS and images load and save faster.
Click to expand...

thats why i said loading will be quicker ;) (for the record my OS and programs drive is a SSD)

i wouldnt expect saving and loading of images to be much quicker for most, i mean who stores all of their images on a fairly small SSD compared to a large mechanical disk? :)
 
neil_g said:
thats why i said loading will be quicker ;) (for the record my OS and programs drive is a SSD)

i wouldnt expect saving and loading of images to be much quicker for most, i mean who stores all of their images on a fairly small SSD compared to a large mechanical disk? :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, but who buys a small SSD? :lol: :p
 
arad85 said:
The simple answer is no, you don't need a high performnce grapics card - almost anything will do. Having said that, £300-£400 isn't going to buy you much of a PC IMHO. You need to be looking at i5-2xxx processors and 8G of memory which are around £500 or so. The i5 has an integrated graphics chip so if you can find one that has a motherboard with video out, it will probably be fie.

Post here (or in the computer section) before you buy and there's a number of people who will give you a view as to whether what you are suggesting is good value.
Click to expand...

I'll agree with you here, but a lot of modern programs are beginning to make use of the GPU's extra processing ability to speed things up, and often the computational processes used in image editing are exactly what the GPUs excel at.

I know that both Photoshop and Aperture on the Mac can offload work onto the GPU, if it's a supported GPU.

So while it's true that you don't have to have a good GPU for image editing, having one may, in certain circumstances, speed things up considerably.
 
neil_g said:
depends on the budget. mines only 60gb but i litterally only use it for OS and programs so need nothing bigger for now. but even a 256gb isnt a LOT of space for images in the grand sceme of things.
Click to expand...

That was supposed to be taken lightly but oh well :D
 
Slaphead said:
I'll agree with you here, but a lot of modern programs are beginning to make use of the GPU's extra processing ability to speed things up, and often the computational processes used in image editing are exactly what the GPUs excel at.

I know that both Photoshop and Aperture on the Mac can offload work onto the GPU, if it's a supported GPU.

So while it's true that you don't have to have a good GPU for image editing, having one may, in certain circumstances, speed things up considerably.
Click to expand...

from what ive read with photoshop it only really takes the GPU into account for rendering and even then the benchmarks have been really underwealming. and adobe have a fairly limited list of tested cards.
 
neil_g said:
from what ive read with photoshop it only really takes the GPU into account for rendering and even then the benchmarks have been really underwealming. and adobe have a fairly limited list of tested cards.
Click to expand...

That's why I said "May, in certain circumstances". Aperture uses the OpenCL API (developed by Apple) go get the GPU to do the work. I've seen quite a difference in performance with Aperture on machines where the GPU was the major difference. This is Aperture 3 by the way. Previous versions don't make use of the GPU

I'm pretty sure that Photoshop uses it's own methods of addressing the GPU, thus I'm inclined to go with you on this. Besides I'm not a heavy photoshop user, and as such I've so far failed to notice if there is a significant performance gain.
 
Photoshop only uses the 2D OpenGL acceleration which anything current will handle easily enough. It doesn't use any of the graphics card processors to speed up PS.

Clearly this might change in the future (Adobe already target the CUDA cores with Premiere Pro Mercury rendering engine where there is a HUGE performance gain but that is video related) but for now, almost anything current will be fine.
 
Well thanks for all your input people :)

I think I could get a reasonable set up for £6-700 which is half the price of the iMac (which if money was no object I would have tomorrow). Very impressed with Lightroom 4 btw, it's really what I was looking for when I bought elements 9. The Image editing part seems so straight forward to use & all the tools are neatly in a row on the right hand side.
 
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hobodan said:
Well thanks for all your input people :)

I think I could get a reasonable set up for £6-700 which is half the price of the iMac (which if money was no object I would have tomorrow). Very impressed with Lightroom 4 btw, it's really what I was looking for when I bought elements 9. The Image editing part seems so straight forward to use & all the tools are neatly in a row on the right hand side.
Click to expand...

If you built it yourself you'd get a damn good one =]
 
If you are comfortable plugging a pc together in a case have a look as Scan's motherboard bundles.
 
If it helps I bought a £300 company pc early last year, no extras and 4gb ram. I run win 7 64bit pre installed and cs5 and have never had an issue, simple answer to your q is no :)
 
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