Question: Was – New video card of value with CS2?

CB
Posted By
Colonel Blip
Jan 5, 2006
Views
656
Replies
19
Status
Closed
Written to All on Sun, 1 Jan 2006 19:12:08 -0600:

Hmmm… been several days and no one responded. Makes me wonder if New Year’s Eve parties got the best of the group. Still trying to decide if new card would help.

Thanks,

Colonel Blip.
E-mail:

CB> Hello, All!

CB> I’m looking for the experience of users here. I have a nVidia GeForce4 CB> MX440 with 64k ram. I’ve had it for a number of years and (about to CB> answer my own question here?) it seems to have served me well.

CB> However, with recent acquisition of CS2 (run Bridge and PS routinely) I CB> was wondering if upgrading my video card would have any effect on speed CB> of PS (I assume by taking load off of the CPU and M/B ram and letting CB> the video card pick it up)? My m/b is PCI and AGP so going to PCI-e is CB> not in the cards.

CB> Any advice in this area?

CB> Thanks,
CB> Colonel Blip.
CB> E-mail:

CB> —-== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com – Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet CB> News==—- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the CB> World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
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H
hollowlegs
Jan 5, 2006
Colonel Blip wrote:
Written to All on Sun, 1 Jan 2006 19:12:08 -0600:

Hmmm… been several days and no one responded. Makes me wonder if New Year’s Eve parties got the best of the group. Still trying to decide if new card would help.

Thanks,

Colonel Blip.
E-mail:

CB> Hello, All!

CB> I’m looking for the experience of users here. I have a nVidia GeForce4 CB> MX440 with 64k ram. I’ve had it for a number of years and (about to CB> answer my own question here?) it seems to have served me well.
CB> However, with recent acquisition of CS2 (run Bridge and PS routinely) I CB> was wondering if upgrading my video card would have any effect on speed CB> of PS (I assume by taking load off of the CPU and M/B ram and letting CB> the video card pick it up)? My m/b is PCI and AGP so going to PCI-e is CB> not in the cards.

CB> Any advice in this area?

CB> Thanks,
CB> Colonel Blip.
CB> E-mail:

CB> —-== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com – Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet CB> News==—- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the CB> World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
CB> —-= East and West-Coast Server Farms – Total Privacy via Encryption CB> =—-

—-== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com – Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==—- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups —-= East and West-Coast Server Farms – Total Privacy via Encryption =—-
H
hollowlegs
Jan 5, 2006
I am surprised you manage to run CS2 at all. With only 64K of ram your pc will spend most of its time creating swap files and you will probably notice your hard drive light never stop flashing. Changing your graphics card will have very little effect other than improving the appearance of images when you are scrolling.

I would recommend you bin your PC and purchase a new one. A good graphics card is essential but you need approx 1GB of system memory and
2.8GHz processor to use Photoshop effectively.
MH
Mike Hyndman
Jan 5, 2006
CB,

The boys in the Adobeforum seem to be in agreement recommending the Matrox range of cards, anything 128MB or above, for use with PSCS2. Granted, they are not the best for 3D, Video or gaming, but have no equal for 2D apps. If you are not into any of these areas it shouldn’t be a problem for you.

HTH
MH
C
Clyde
Jan 5, 2006
hollowlegs wrote:
I am surprised you manage to run CS2 at all. With only 64K of ram your pc will spend most of its time creating swap files and you will probably notice your hard drive light never stop flashing. Changing your graphics card will have very little effect other than improving the appearance of images when you are scrolling.

I would recommend you bin your PC and purchase a new one. A good graphics card is essential but you need approx 1GB of system memory and
2.8GHz processor to use Photoshop effectively.

I’m sure that is 64K of video RAM. He probably means 64 MB anyway. That’s a whole ‘nuther ball game.

I have run Photoshop CS with the 16M of video that was on my mobo. It ran fine. At the time I upgraded to CS2, many people believed it ran better and faster with 128 MB of video RAM or more. I got a great deal on an ATI board with 256 MB. CS2 runs fine with it. However, I can’t say that it runs better or faster with more video RAM.

Generally Photoshop is a 2D application that doesn’t touch the 3D processing power of most of today’s cards. As a 2D application it doesn’t need to process much of anything to display on a monitor. If it isn’t doing much, it shouldn’t need much RAM to do it in.

Adobe hasn’t been saying, but a lot of people believe that they changed something in their video processing of CS2 to start to take advantage of todays video cards. It seems to be very little though and may be more for future versions. Of course, with Adobe not confirming or denying any of this, it’s hard to tell.

Most people I’ve talked to or read seem to think that you don’t need much video power or RAM to run Photoshop. A graphics card with 64 MB of RAM should be just fine. OTOH, you probably will not notice a bit of difference.

Clyde
CB
Colonel Blip
Jan 5, 2006
Hello, hollowlegs!
You wrote on 5 Jan 2006 06:19:28 -0800:

I reread my post – not real clear on the memory – as Clyde suspected, this is video RAM and at 64 mb.

Thanks,

Colonel Blip.
E-mail:

h> I am surprised you manage to run CS2 at all. With only 64K of ram your h> pc will spend most of its time creating swap files and you will h> probably notice your hard drive light never stop flashing. Changing h> your graphics card will have very little effect other than improving h> the appearance of images when you are scrolling.

h> I would recommend you bin your PC and purchase a new one. A good h> graphics card is essential but you need approx 1GB of system memory and h> 2.8GHz processor to use Photoshop effectively.

—-== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com – Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==—- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups —-= East and West-Coast Server Farms – Total Privacy via Encryption =—-
CB
Colonel Blip
Jan 5, 2006
Hello, Clyde!
You wrote on Thu, 05 Jan 2006 11:13:17 -0600:

Thanks; sounds like I shouldn’t be in a big hurry at this point. I don’t do 3D so no need to move on that basis.

As far as processing power, etc. I have 2 gb DDR and an Athlon64 processor with RAID0 for my applications and IDE with backups for data.

Colonel Blip.
E-mail:

C> hollowlegs wrote:
??>> I am surprised you manage to run CS2 at all. With only 64K of ram your C> I’m sure that is 64K of video RAM. He probably means 64 MB anyway. C> That’s a whole ‘nuther ball game.

C> I have run Photoshop CS with the 16M of video that was on my mobo. It C> ran fine. At the time I upgraded to CS2, many people believed it ran C> better and faster with 128 MB of video RAM or more. I got a great deal C> on an ATI board with 256 MB. CS2 runs fine with it. However, I can’t say C> that it runs better or faster with more video RAM.

C> Generally Photoshop is a 2D application that doesn’t touch the 3D C> processing power of most of today’s cards. As a 2D application it C> doesn’t need to process much of anything to display on a monitor. If it C> isn’t doing much, it shouldn’t need much RAM to do it in.

C> Adobe hasn’t been saying, but a lot of people believe that they changed C> something in their video processing of CS2 to start to take advantage of C> todays video cards. It seems to be very little though and may be more C> for future versions. Of course, with Adobe not confirming or denying any C> of this, it’s hard to tell.

C> Most people I’ve talked to or read seem to think that you don’t need C> much video power or RAM to run Photoshop. A graphics card with 64 MB of C> RAM should be just fine. OTOH, you probably will not notice a bit of C> difference.

C> Clyde

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F
Fungusamungus
Jan 5, 2006
"Mike Hyndman" wrote in message
CB,

The boys in the Adobeforum seem to be in agreement recommending the Matrox range of cards, anything 128MB or above, for use with PSCS2. Granted, they are not the best for 3D, Video or gaming, but have no equal for 2D apps. If you are not into any of these areas it shouldn’t be a problem for you.
HTH
MH

The best 2D video card in the world doesn’t mean squat if your monitor sucks 😉

That’s something to keep in mind. I just got a new comp myself, 2.8ghz. Pentium D, 1 gig of ram and a 128mb ATI Radeon card. The system was a slightly modified gaming and multimedia comp, but PSCS2 runs beautifully on it. (as does the demo of Illustrator CS 2, so I assume the full version runs fine on it as well).
MH
Mike Hyndman
Jan 5, 2006
The best 2D video card in the world doesn’t mean squat if your monitor sucks 😉

If that was the case, any card would be of little use.

MH
F
Fungusamungus
Jan 6, 2006
"Mike Hyndman" wrote in message
The best 2D video card in the world doesn’t mean squat if your monitor sucks 😉

If that was the case, any card would be of little use.

MH

Exactly, but what I’m saying is, you still need to take the monitor into account. A Matrox may kick ass as far as 2d color rendering goes, but it’s still not going to be perfect on an LCD monitor (especially if the monitor is more than 1-2 years old). So if you’re using an LCD, you don’t have to spend maximum bucks on a good graphics card, as you’re not going to be able to use it to it’s fullest (that doesn’t mean get a P.O.S. card, but you get the idea).
YD
yodel_dodel
Jan 6, 2006
Mike Hyndman wrote:

The boys in the Adobeforum seem to be in agreement recommending the Matrox range of cards, anything 128MB or above, for use with PSCS2.

I think I know what a graphics adapter does, and what distiguishes a simple from an upscale one.

However, I don’t have the foggiest idea what a fancy graphics adapter can do for PS performance in a simple single-screen configuration. Do you?


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T
Tacit
Jan 6, 2006
In article ,
"Colonel Blip" wrote:

CB> I’m looking for the experience of users here. I have a nVidia GeForce4 CB> MX440 with 64k ram. I’ve had it for a number of years and (about to CB> answer my own question here?) it seems to have served me well.
CB> However, with recent acquisition of CS2 (run Bridge and PS routinely) I CB> was wondering if upgrading my video card would have any effect on speed CB> of PS (I assume by taking load off of the CPU and M/B ram and letting CB> the video card pick it up)?

Photoshop is strictly a 2D image editing program. Photoshop does not use, and does not benefit from, a 3D accelerated card. A 3D accelerated card does not speed up (or affect in any way) Photoshop’s image manipulation, and Photoshop functions can not be offloaded onto a graphic card’s GPU.


Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
MH
Mike Hyndman
Jan 6, 2006
..
However, I don’t have the foggiest idea what a fancy graphics adapter can do for PS performance in a simple single-screen configuration. Do you?

How do you define fancy? What I am saying is that to get the best out of PS you do not need an expensive 3D rendering card because PS does not utilise 3D rendering, it works solely in 2D. So a card that is good in 2D but lacking in its 3D and video capabilities will be perfectly adequate and cheaper for use with PS. The trick is finding one, as graphics cards tend to be advertised on their 3D strengths.
The money saved can be used to buy more system RAM or another scratch disc. MH
CW
C Wright
Jan 6, 2006
However, I don’t have the foggiest idea what a fancy graphics adapter can do for PS performance in a simple single-screen configuration. Do you?

How do you define fancy? What I am saying is that to get the best out of PS you do not need an expensive 3D rendering card because PS does not utilise 3D rendering, it works solely in 2D. So a card that is good in 2D but lacking in its 3D and video capabilities will be perfectly adequate and cheaper for use with PS. The trick is finding one, as graphics cards tend to be advertised on their 3D strengths.
The money saved can be used to buy more system RAM or another scratch disc. MH
A question that I have not seen answered yet is: will the added memory available on many of the newer graphics cards do any good with reference to PS performance? Many graphics cards are now shipping with 256MB of on-board memory. Many of my images are in the 200MB range, some are in the 1GB range, but that is more the exception than the rule. Can writing a complete large image to the graphics card benefit PS in any way or is all that additional memory there just for 3D rendering?
Chuck
C
Clyde
Jan 6, 2006
C Wright wrote:
However, I don’t have the foggiest idea what a fancy graphics adapter can do for PS performance in a simple single-screen configuration. Do you?

How do you define fancy? What I am saying is that to get the best out of PS you do not need an expensive 3D rendering card because PS does not utilise 3D rendering, it works solely in 2D. So a card that is good in 2D but lacking in its 3D and video capabilities will be perfectly adequate and cheaper for use with PS. The trick is finding one, as graphics cards tend to be advertised on their 3D strengths.
The money saved can be used to buy more system RAM or another scratch disc. MH

A question that I have not seen answered yet is: will the added memory available on many of the newer graphics cards do any good with reference to PS performance? Many graphics cards are now shipping with 256MB of on-board memory. Many of my images are in the 200MB range, some are in the 1GB range, but that is more the exception than the rule. Can writing a complete large image to the graphics card benefit PS in any way or is all that additional memory there just for 3D rendering?
Chuck

I thought I had answered that from my experience. It isn’t a perfect example, but it’s something.

I ran CS from 16 MB on my mobo and it ran fine. When I upgraded to CS2, I also bought an ATI video card that had 256 MB of video RAM. I know I changed two variables at once and that doesn’t help a real test. For example, CS2 may be able to use more video RAM than CS did. At the time it was thought that the extra memory helped get around some speed problems in CS2. (Later found to be NOT the case.)

In my experience, I could see no difference in video performance using Photoshop between CS using 16 MB of mobo video RAM and CS2 using 256 MB of ATI video RAM. I did noticed a slight improvement in speed with CS2, but not in the video performance.

Your experience may be different, but I haven’t found anyone who has had a difference experience.

Clyde
F
Fungusamungus
Jan 6, 2006
"C Wright" wrote in message
A question that I have not seen answered yet is: will the added memory available on many of the newer graphics cards do any good with reference to
PS performance? Many graphics cards are now shipping with 256MB of on-board
memory. Many of my images are in the 200MB range, some are in the 1GB range, but that is more the exception than the rule. Can writing a complete
large image to the graphics card benefit PS in any way or is all that additional memory there just for 3D rendering?
Chuck

I pretty much thought what everyone was implying was the latter (the extra memory being utilized for 3D rendering). Which of course, would be the correct answer. Most of the extra memory on vid cards nowadays is used to store textures, rendered pallettes, etc. for 3D games and applications that can access said 3D functions.
WD
Walter Donavan
Jan 8, 2006
My AMD 2000+ runs PS CS/CS2 just fine with 32 MB VRAM and 512 MB RAM (- the 32 MB for the V card). Of course, I only process small images, usually less than 3 MB. I wouldn’t want to try a 25 MB image, though.
T
Tacit
Jan 8, 2006
In article <BFE3E67B.4F6E8%>,
C Wright wrote:

A question that I have not seen answered yet is: will the added memory available on many of the newer graphics cards do any good with reference to PS performance?

No.

Many graphics cards are now shipping with 256MB of on-board memory. Many of my images are in the 200MB range, some are in the 1GB range, but that is more the exception than the rule.

The size of the image is not relevant to the RAM in the video card. The RAM in the video card is not used to store the image being worked on; that stays in main system memory.

The RAM in the video card is used to store texture maps and other information for 3D rendering.

Can writing a complete
large image to the graphics card benefit PS in any way or is all that additional memory there just for 3D rendering?

You gain no benefit from storing an image in the video card RAM; Photoshop’s image processing actions all occur in the system’s main CPU, not the GPU, so the image would need to be moved back into main memory for any image processing actions anyway.

A long time ago, Adobe licensed the image processing engine to a third party, who made a piece of hardware for Mac systems called a "photo engine." The photo engine card–I had one–was a Mac NuBus card with a number of custom Texas Instruments digital processor chips and the Photoshop image editing core. A special Photoshop plugin moved the image being edited to the Photo Engine, which accelerated image processing operations dramatically.

The Photo Engine worked only with Photoshop 3. To my knowledge, no similar hardware was made for later versions of Photoshop, though I could be mistaken.


Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
CW
C Wright
Jan 8, 2006
On 1/7/06 9:29 PM, in article
, "tacit"
wrote:

snip
A long time ago, Adobe licensed the image processing engine to a third party, who made a piece of hardware for Mac systems called a "photo engine." The photo engine card–I had one–was a Mac NuBus card with a number of custom Texas Instruments digital processor chips and the Photoshop image editing core. A special Photoshop plugin moved the image being edited to the Photo Engine, which accelerated image processing operations dramatically.

The Photo Engine worked only with Photoshop 3. To my knowledge, no similar hardware was made for later versions of Photoshop, though I could be mistaken.

Thanks for the information, and the history lesson! I wonder if there would be a market for such a card today or if modern CPU’s are fast enough that not much benefit would be gained. Obviously, even back then, the third party card was not very popular if the idea died after PS 3. Chuck
D
Dave
Jan 8, 2006
snip
A long time ago, Adobe licensed the image processing engine to a third party,
Chuck

‘A long time ago…’ This long time is obviously lòòòng in computer terms:-)

Dave

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