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Best Photoshop CPU?

P

paw64

n00b
Joined
Jul 14, 2005
Messages
16
What PC Procssor is the best for rendering large, mulit-layer images in Photoshop 7?
And how important is the Video card in this?
 
intel 955 extreme edition - dual core with hyperthreading

video, dosent really matter, just get a decent one i guess
 
I didnt think Photoshop was multi-threaded...
Wouldnt a single core work best?
 
paw64 said:
I didnt think Photoshop was multi-threaded...
Wouldnt a single core work best?
Click to expand...
Photoshop has been multithreaded for many years now.
 
Not all things in Photoshop are multithreaded, though... Anyway, I'd say a dualcore Athlon is the best bang per buck in Photoshop, just like in everything else. ;) No need to spend a thousand bucks on a dualcore P4XE just to get good Photoshop performance. In fact, you're probably better off getting a more low-end processor and more RAM and faster hard drive.

The video card matters quite a bit when scrolling around, at least in the Mac version, but it doesn't affect the rendering of filters or such one bit.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Not all things in Photoshop are multithreaded, though... Anyway, I'd say a dualcore Athlon is the best bang per buck in Photoshop, just like in everything else. ;) No need to spend a thousand bucks on a dualcore P4XE just to get good Photoshop performance. In fact, you're probably better off getting a more low-end processor and more RAM and faster hard drive.
.
Click to expand...

he did say "THE BEST"
;)

but i agree, a X2 is a good value if not looking for "THE BEST"
 
santaliqueur said:
it's a good value, but the best would be much more expensive, the opteron 280.
Click to expand...

man forgot about those optys, 2 of those dual core monsters with boat loads of ram is the ticket!
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Not all things in Photoshop are multithreaded, though...
Click to expand...
No, just the filters and pretty much everything that's cpu-bound.

The video card matters quite a bit when scrolling around, at least in the Mac version, but it doesn't affect the rendering of filters or such one bit.
Click to expand...
You want good 2D performance and decent quality ramdacs...you don't need an expensive 3D rendering card. Most any sub-$100 card will give you identical performance to a $600 screamer.
 
Asian Dub Foundation said:
he did say "THE BEST"
;)

but i agree, a X2 is a good value if not looking for "THE BEST"
Click to expand...
AMD has a solid lead in a lot of applications, but in Photoshop, its usually a tie or an Intel win.
 
masher said:
AMD has a solid lead in a lot of applications, but in Photoshop, its usually a tie or an Intel win.
Click to expand...

They never seem to do the performance comparisons with an Opteron board with Non Uniform Memory Access support though. I'd like to see a speed test with a NUMA supporting board.

Still, you'd probably be better off saving the money of a top end NUMA Opteron board and spending it on RAM and HD space.
 
nessus said:
They never seem to do the performance comparisons with an Opteron board with Non Uniform Memory Access support though.
Click to expand...
Does Photoshop even support any NUMA OS? I thought it was SMP-only?
 
masher said:
Does Photoshop even support any NUMA OS? I thought it was SMP-only?
Click to expand...

Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 server support NUMA if they are on NUMA hardware. NUMA hardware is still SMP. Both processors have the same privledges and share responsibility for thread scheduling. There is no dedicated processor handling the scheduling load, but both processors have system memory ranges to which they have dedicated busses (their own direct hypertransport bus). They also have a shared hypertransport bus to transfer data from each processors dedicated memory to the other processor when necessary.

For operations where each processor is working from its own dedicated memory range, you have the full throughput of two hypertransport buses instead of just one. Only when one processor needs something from the other processors memory range do they end up sharing the same hypertransport bus for memory throughput.

When the data needed by one processor is in the other processors memory, it behaves exactly like a dual core AMD processor on a non-NUMA board, the transfer goes through the hypertransport bus of the other processor then across the shared hypertransport bus.

I would think Photshop would have different threads working on the same memory areas, so I'm not sure how much NUMA would benenfit Phototshop, but I would like to see some numbers for once.
 
I'd say for a Midrange system go Intel but I really think for the Ultra High End the Tyan K8WE mother board with dual Opteron 280's would be the fastest.
 
nessus said:
Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 server support NUMA if they are on NUMA hardware. NUMA hardware is still SMP.
Click to expand...
The only true NUMA hardware I know is definitely *not* SMP. And I thought XP only supported cc:NUMA (akak "NUMA-lite"), and that was only in the 64-bit version? If I'm wrong here, let me know.
 
well I use dual 240 Opterons
keep in mind that regardless of the amount of RAM and NUMA
Photoshop is limited to 2GB as a process
 
If you work with images so large that even 2GB isn't really enough, you should definitely consider a Power Mac, simply because Mac Pshop can use way more than 2 gigs of RAM. Still, I don't think many people need towork with images that large.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
If you work with images so large that even 2GB isn't really enough, you should definitely consider a Power Mac, simply because Mac Pshop can use way more than 2 gigs of RAM. Still, I don't think many people need towork with images that large.
Click to expand...


???

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0501adobe.html

Photoshop CS 2.0 will not feature 64-bit support, but lays the groundwork for that support, which will arrive with Photoshop 10 (presumably CS 3.0). Photoshop users will also have to wait until Version 10 for the software to use more than 2GB of RAM. Like the rest of the new Creative Suite 2.0 applications, Photoshop CS 2.0 will take advantage of Adobe's new cross-suite file browser, dubbed Bridge.
Click to expand...

its the software not the platform adobe no longer can afford a parity gap between platforms
and it looks like I was wrong CS2 v10 is out now

High-capacity RAM compatibility

Make the most of systems running 64-bit processors. Photoshop CS2 can address approximately 3.5 GB of RAM on a Power Macintosh G5 running Mac OS X, a Windows XP 64-bit Edition system running an Intel® Xeon™ processor with EM64T, or an AMD Athlon™ 64 or Opteron™ processor.
Click to expand...
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/newfeatures2.html
the lastest edition

of course that doesnt immediately help me :p
but that might actually be worth getting in that case, Im running 4GB on the workstation
and I do work with large images, youd be suprised what the history can do with a large tif, chew right through that RAM and hit the scratch disk\array
 
I just saw benchmarks where it was faster all the way up to 8 gigs of RAM. I don't know the technicalities of Photoshop for either platform. :p
 
scuttlebutt Ive heard is those benchmarks are heavily slanted using a few filters that are optimized for the AltiVec engine. And dont really have a "real world" basis, well unless you employ those plugins alot


http://www.dspengineering.com/articles/paavola/
optimized AltiVec aps do funny things with benchmarks
but note memory bandwidth in the above
 
Look, Any dual core with 1-2GB of ram will run nicely. If you go over any of that, it will run better. I run anm Opteron 175 and 2GB of ram, and Photoshop runs nice and smooth with it.
There's no reason to spend $1000 on a CPU, nor is there any reason to run 4GB+ of ram.
 
In fact there are very few reasons to run 4GB of RAM, I do it because

A. I have a dual channel, dual CPU mobo, each channel with a single 1GB stick
(Tyan K8W, will actually support 16GB)

B. My best friend works for a memory company :p

when long coded 64bit aps become common this old dinousar will find new legs to employ that RAM but Ive been very very hard pressed to fully employ it currently
were this a server instead of a workstation that would be different
 
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