Best GPU for PhotoShop/Lightroom

[DeaconFrost]

My wife has been a hobbyist photographer for a few years and uses it mainly as a fundraiser for her annual walk. She has Crohn's, so photo-editing is something she enjoys doing, especially when she isn't feeling great. I am building her a tower to act is her processing station. She has a tablet that connects via HDMI for finer detail editing. She uses Photoshop and Lightroom, and has begin working with CyberLink PowerDirector to dabble in some video editing. I am left with a choice of two GPUs, but I'm not sure if the newer generation tech or the increased memory is more important for her needs. Specs below, along with the two choices:

ASUS RTX 2060 12GB
eVGA RTX 3050 8GB

Specs:
Ryzen 7 3700X
ASUS B550-F Gaming
32 GB Crucial Memory
Samsung 500GB 960 Pro
Samsung 2TB 970 EVO
Samsung 1920x1080 monitor, but she may want a 2560x1440 screen soon (because I have one and she'll want that)

 

[northrop]

You won't see much difference between the two in Lightroom. LR doesn't really use much vram, and GPU acceleration only requires 2GB to run. Video editing however, is a different ballgame, so if your choice is only between the two cards listed, I'd go with the 2060 to get access to more vram.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

For Lightroom/Photoshop, basically and discrete GPU can cover this. With some exceptions, if your wife is shooting with a 150MP PhaseOne back and needs to use 50 layers in Photoshop, having a card with more VRAM would be useful. But considering that would be an $80,000 camera and $6000~ per lens, you likely could afford whatever computer you want to support that system and wouldn't need to ask this question in the first place. For most people shooting on 'regular' cameras at 50 or so MP or below, either of those cards is fine.

As northrop mentions, video editing is a totally different ball game. And if you want maximum performance than that basically requires each component in your machine be as fast as possible. SSD drives (or raid) for all your editing drives, lots of RAM, more cores, and the fastest GPU you can buy. Bottlenecks in video editing are easy to trip into. If all she's editing is 1080p video, then it's pretty easy to edit that on almost anything at this point. But in 4k, depending on codec, bitrate, etc, it's easy to bring computers to a crawl. That basic system though is more than good enough as a starting point. I worked with less for a long while.

I might also recommend you look into a 4k display with true 10-bit (no FRC) and some form of color calibration. Having more space to work with and a color accurate display will matter much more than gaming features. I'm assuming that the primary (and perhaps only) purpose of this computer is photo/video work - in which case things like VFR and/or high refresh rate displays aren't even entering into the equation. There are solutions from LG, Benq, and to a lesser degree Asus (ProArt displays - although I constantly hear bad things about Asus support...) that shouldn't break the bank.

 

[bigdogchris]

Hey, I don't want to hijack this thread but I have a similar question. If I'm building out a few stations for training for Adobe CC suite, is a higher end Intel CPU with iGPU/QuickSync enough or is a dedicated GPU required? Again, this is only for training/light use, I don't want to be strictly CPU accelerated but I don't have a budget to go crazy with GPU's either. Also, is anything required to get the GPU acceleration going or will it pick that up by default.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Hey, I don't want to hijack this thread but I have a similar question. If I'm building out a few stations for training for Adobe CC suite, is a higher end Intel CPU with iGPU/QuickSync enough or is a dedicated GPU required? Again, this is only for training/light use, I don't want to be strictly CPU accelerated but I don't have a budget to go crazy with GPU's either.

Adobe Suite in general is very poorly optimized. Leading it to need much higher resources than competing software and what it should "need" otherwise.
If all you're doing is Photoshop/Lightroom, basically anything will get the job done. At least if you're talking about normal behaviors. If you're working with 24MP and below photos, and you're not dealing with people creating 100's of layers for compositing, then Photoshop is not really a big deal at all. It's a similar story in Lightroom, although Lightroom basically has to constantly re-render everything that is happening. It benefits more from faster hard drives a little bit more. But you should be "okay" with onboard graphics.

If you want to do anything in Premiere at all, I would highly recommend not using an APU if you can at all afford it. If you're expecting users to operate in 4k and not just 1080p, then the requirements also go up a lot. Having a card with at least 8GB of RAM to frame buffer will help a good deal, but just having the fastest computer you can in general will also do that. For Premiere it's about single core performance, fast video cards, lots of RAM, and fast hard drives. Basically, it's a very intensive task.

HOWEVER, if you are doing this for a school or small business, a quick hack would be to get a bunch of M1 iMacs or Mac Minis. Although ideally you'd wait for M2, just so you can get the 24GB of RAM and the better subsystem (no update on when those are coming, but imminently). M1/M2's would be a big uplift for machines that need to work out of the box and will likely never need or want an upgrade during its installation cycle (and you can't anyway, to be clear), while taking up next to no space. With all of the dedicated hardware space for decoding, things like h.265 editing is much faster on M1/M2 than a PC costing the same cost. Especially considering in the case of the iMac, the nice display that comes with it.

Also, is anything required to get the GPU acceleration going or will it pick that up by default.

Generally no. There is settings to check inside the software, but it should all be enabled by default.

 

[bigdogchris]

I'm looking at the newer iMac's and they only come with 8GB of memory and are using M1 as well for graphics for around $1,700. Is that really the best option for Photoshop going with a affordable MAC?

 

[UnknownSouljer]

I'm looking at the newer iMac's and they only come with 8GB of memory and are using M1 as well for graphics for around $1,700. Is that really the best option for Photoshop going with a affordable MAC?

I would honestly wait for the M2.
If you want an iMac, not sure what you're looking at, but you can get the core upgrades and 16GB of RAM for $1700.
However, if you're willing to bring all your own peripherals, it probably makes way more sense to buy a base level Mac Studio which will smoke that machine for "only" $300 more. The speed increase is significant. Not only that but it will have double the RAM at 32GB, twice the HD space at 512, in addition to way more CPU/GPU cores as provided by the Max Chip. The I/O upgrades are also significant.

Otherwise for a 16GB M1 Mac, I'd just get a Mac Mini and save the money over the iMac - $1100 for all the cores, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. The iMac's main strength is it is a complete system ready to deploy for education/corporate that doesn't take up a lot of space. It also has all of the Apple conveniences built in. Excellent display, decent audio, good mics, decent camera, etc. Also comes with keyboard and mouse. If you need a good display it is worth the extra $600. If you already have a nice 10-bit display to grade with, and your own keyboard and mouse, then you can skip it. Also, if space and ease of deployment doesn't matter as much, then I'd just get another system.
I assume at some point there will be another "flagship" iMac equipped with a 5k display and a Max or greater chip. But that hasn't arrived yet. Perhaps it will when the new Mac Pro drops. Anyway, that's a lot of conjecture, but I believe it to be a matter of time. Not really an if, but a when.

 

[bigdogchris]

UnknownSouljer I think the benefit of the iMac is the built in display, otherwise buying a Mac Mini I'm stuck paying big bucks for a stand alone monitor.

I didn't know I can get Memory upgrade on them, I just looked at the actual Apple site and see it's an option. With 16GB of memory and 512 GB storage their not priced that bad I guess. You say the M1 SOC is good even for graphic intensive Adobe apps?

 

[UnknownSouljer]

UnknownSouljer I think the benefit of the iMac is the built in display, otherwise buying a Mac Mini I'm stuck paying big bucks for a stand alone monitor.

It’s trade offs. When it comes time to upgrade the machine, you’ll either need to buy a monitor at that point or buy another iMac.

For $600 you can get a monitor that’s reasonable for grading and editing. That’s not in question.

Or alternatively, buy a better monitor now and keep it for longer. The point is, you can buy the precise monitor you want when it's not attatched to a computer.

I didn't know I can get Memory upgrade on them, I just looked at the actual Apple site and see it's an option.

Yes. Keep in mind it has to be configured at purchase. It is not user upgradable after purchase.

With 16GB of memory and 512 GB storage their not priced that bad I guess. You say the M1 SOC is good even for graphic intensive Adobe apps?

It depends on what you mean by intensive apps. Lightroom and Photoshop in my opinion are pretty lightweight. My 4 core sandy bridge machine from 2011 is still more than capable of just Photoshop and Lightroom.

The thing that the M1 will struggle with is editing raw video and/or >4K resolution video. If you’re doing basic video editing it will be a breeze. Multitrack with effects will cause slow downs.

 

[bigdogchris]

I decided to just buy some PC's for my Adobe CC project.

Few questions...

On PC, does Premiere automatically detect and enable hardware acceleration if Nvidia GPU is present? I see instructions online for turning it on, but this is going to be a multi user environment so I don't want to have to manually enable it for every user account on the PC. If scriptable during install that's fine too.

I'm not going to spend time explaining why, but the systems we are getting have a 12500 and 16GB of memory (upgradable to 32GB) The GPU is a Nvidia T600 4GB (upgradable to RTX A2000 6GB).

I obviously get that a better card and more memory is faster, but we're talking just editing 1080p here in an entry level learning environment. Is is worth the cost to upgrade the memory and/or GPU?