Best Hardware for PS?

MB
Posted By
Matt_Byrne
Feb 23, 2004
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403
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10
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Ok money no real factor (although i’m not talking about bolting together 50 processors etc! 😉 ) Whats the best Workstation available for large image processing in Photoshop CS?

I spose i was thinking something along the lines of a P4 3.02 machine with high bandwith ddr memory (4gb?), then 10k SATA hard drives – one of which being completely dedicated to a scratch disk (minimum size?). And then the question of video card….

<http://www.ati.com/products/fireglx2-256t/index.html> <http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx_family.html>
<http://www.3dlabs.com/product/wildcatvp/vppro/index.htm> <http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/parhelia/256mb.cfm>

Which ones the best? Bearing in mind its not really for 3D graphics but for very large 2D imaging. Any other cards to be recommended?

The reason i am interested is that i’ve been asked to get together a machine capable of "mosaicing" multiple shots from a large camera rig.
So creating a tif. of approx. 7gb size…Currently we create tifs upto 2gb in size.

Any discussion is welcome – whats the best machine being used out there at the moment (Adobe devs what do you use?).

Regards
Matt
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Robert_Levine
Feb 23, 2004
Matt,

Please have a look through the forum. This has been discussed numerous times and you’ll likely find the info you’re looking for is already posted.

Bob
MB
Matt_Byrne
Feb 23, 2004
Unfortunately i have tried the forums and looked extensively on the web, but what people seem to call "Very large imagery" is only in the region of 400mb. (A few years ago i never would have dreamed of saying that! 🙂 ) But i am now, like i mentioned, talking about creating images in the region of >2gb.

There must be someone out there who is using the absolute extreme?

Or maybe photoshop does not gain from the absolute top in technology? I know version 6 seemed to only utilise 1gb of ram, later fixed by v7, and the same occured with dual processors.

Anyone?

Matt
L
LenHewitt
Feb 23, 2004
Matt,

So creating a tif. of approx. 7gb size…<<

Photoshop CS supports TIFF files up to 4 GB in size. Documents larger than 4 GB cannot be saved in TIFF format.

I believe that is a limitation of the TIFF file format, so you are going to have to re-think that as an option….

..PSB format supports files up to 300,000 pixels in any dimension with file-size being restricted by the machine’s abilities, not Photoshop or the file-format.
MB
Matt_Byrne
Feb 24, 2004
Right i had heard of that, but when i got CS and noticed it was capable of creating a larger canvas size i thought that the 4gb limit had been a PS v7 limitation.

It sounds like that 4gb limit occurs in alot of formats – being a limitation of the 32 bit file structure.

"Probably the reason for a 4GB limit is that Tiff files have 32-bit pointers to places within the file. And the limits of a 32-bit number are 4,294,967,295." ( http://remotesensing.org/lists/libtiff_archive/msg01257.html)

That leaves me with two questions – What is the Best hardware out there for PS, when creating up to 4gb tiffs.

And two – What will replace the Tiff file format as what many seem to class the archive standard?

Regards

Matt
L
LenHewitt
Feb 24, 2004
Matt,

Well your 4 gig RAM suggestion would be wasted on Photoshop that can only address 2gigs, so 3 gigs would be more than enough to give Photoshop all it can handle and still have RAM for the O/S.
MB
Matt_Byrne
Feb 25, 2004
Yes i had heard that 3gb was considered the sweet spot… My 4gb comment "i thought that the 4gb limit had been a PS v7 limitation", was referring to the size of tif files not to usable ram.

Don’t spose you have any experiance with top end 3D cards as i posted in my 1st message? I’m wondering whether to spend the extra on the Wildcat – 512mb of video ram!! Even though i am aware PS CS isn’t a 3D application, i was thinking that these top end cards with large amounts of video ram would still have a big performance boost to the 2D side of things, compared to the lower matrox cards G550’s and even possibly the Parhelia?

I was tempted to use RAID 0/1 (the mirroring one – i forget which) on 2 x 10k SATA Harddrives as well, purely as the scratch disk.

Thanks for your replies Len – any response is welcome. Out of interest what is your relationship with Adobe? Are you a user, or do you work for Adobe?

Regards

Matt
L
LenHewitt
Feb 25, 2004
Matt,

Photoshop will use no more video RAM than that dictated by the screen rez and colour depth you are running. So from Photoshop’s P.O.V. 128 meg is way overkill……RAMDAC speed will however be a factor in video performance
MB
Matt_Byrne
Feb 25, 2004
Thats quite interesting – when you look at the graphics card selling points they seem to put alot of weight on the fact that their card has "x" amount of video ram etc. I had not realised that to display any image on my screen (1600×1200) at 16 bit high colour it only requires 38 mb!

And it also appears that all the above mentioned video cards use dual-10 bit DACs. With the Wildcat running at 370 MHz and the ATi FireGL X2-256t running at 400MHz. My current Matrox G550 running at 360MHz.

And i expect when using 3gb of system RAM then the difference in video memory becomes completely insignificant. Although there would be some difference in memory bandwith etc – but like i say almost undetectable.

Only really leaves me with a decision to make on Harddrive (scratch disk setup), volumn of free space on a RAID’ed 10k access SATA drive?
And then whether to use dual processors, AMD/INtel etc 🙂

Thanks for the help…

Matt
MB
Matt_Byrne
Feb 27, 2004
Anyone know if using RAID will work? As the scratch disk file is just that…one file, so therefore the computer would only access/create it off one of the HDDs? Thus losing the benefit of RAID (the mirroring one – for performance only not data recovery) which works off the basis of the computer accessing "alternate files" if you like.

Ie. Loading application "C" which is made up of components "A" and "B". "A" is accessed off one HDD at the same time as "B" is accessed of the 2nd HDD so two components are accesed simultaneously rather than in sequence as with non-RAID systems. Therefore in theory halving the load time?

Anyone know if this is the case?

Matt
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Feb 27, 2004
Matt, Matt, Matt… a lot of confusion you have…
3D graphics card are a waste of mony if all you intend to do is photoshop. Choose one able to du dual or triple screen, with a good "sharpness" most new cards are ok, even if the Matrox were known to be superior in that peculiar field…
RAID. Raid 1 is mirrorring, it copies the same data on two or more disks for security (redundancy) RAID 0 is called striping (not stripping) it copies half of the data on each disk, for speed reasons. You loose a lot on the reliability side, as if one disk fails, all the striped data is lost, including on the second disk. I’d use if only for the PS scratch disks.

But I wouldn’t trash my money on the PC, as it will become obsolete in less time than needed to writ this. Always choose the soft spot on the price curve, and choose good monitors (the sony artisan, or the lacie/Mitsubishi ones.. a high resolution scanner (3200dpi or more) a good film/slide scanner (the new Nikons seems promising) a high quality printer, etc…

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