Is a laptop powerful enough for photo editing?

[kelly_flanigan1]

<p>Look at it this way. For 20 YEARS many folks have been preaching to get a good graphics card for photoshop usage. If one sells computers; it is a great way to make extra money; one makes more on the wazoo graphics card than the entire starter machine!</p>

<p>With a machine from about 9 years ago that has 2 gigs of ram and a 2.5GHZ CPU; it has my old 400 buck Diamond stealth card from 1995 with 4 megs of ram. It is totally ok for making calendars each year that are about 200 to 400 megs with many layers. The card is poorer for the gaming crowd; more artifacts on men and airplanes.</p>

<p>Here I have the same class machines with the same ram and CPU;l some with high end 500 buck modern cards; ; some with old ebay 5 bucks stuff; some running the the built in integrated video. With a giant file of many many hundreds of megs the redraw is quicker for CAD work; and a yawn with photoshop; often not an issue.</p>

<p>With all my several dozens of photoshop machines used since Photoshop 2.5 with the PC; I find the claims that one needs a wazoo video card to be asuckers game; trhe lay and stupid and dumb fall into this con. Photoshop uses hardly any video at all. It was a bigger issue back in 1995 with my 3200 buck dream machine that was 90 Mhz and 16 megs of ram; a better card helped then.</p>

<p>Once ram on boxes got to the whopping level of say 512 megs; uising even integrated video often works well with Photoshop.</p>

<p>Today about the ONLY reason here I have bought a new video card was the aspect ratio's and new LCD X by Y dimenions are not supported; ie not a performance issue but one of lack of drivers.</p>

<p>Some of the later versions of Photoshop want to see a better card; when often it works well on an older box too.</p>

<p>Preaching one needs a better graphics card for photoshop is as old as Photoshop; it is a way that schools and businesses can also use the boxes for video games.</p>

<p>It is also to spike the computers cost; the lay and dumb give the sales chap a nice big spif/commission.</p>

 

[garrison_k.]

<blockquote>

<p>Garrison, we all know that we need to replace our computers after 3-4 years to follow software needs. So even if my laptop dies after 4 years, witch i doubt, I will change it for a better one. 4 years is like a eternity for computers.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>It used to be, Richard. Five years ago we had weaker computers on 32-bit while at the same time our needs were growing every month with bigger cameras and their files. Not so today. DSLR file size is remaining around 12 to 15 meg while our computers have become 5 X's faster. We wont be craving faster computers as much today as we did 2005 and you wont be using file sizes 5 x greater in 2015.</p>

<p>I couldn't imagine doing the work I do today on my old P4 with 2 gigs of ram.</p>

<p>Four years from now we will be using photoshop in the clouds. Google "CS6 Cloud Computing" and read some of the stuff that adobe is working on. At that point, I dream, any $400 computer that connects to the internet will do.</p>

[mark_tate]

<p>I use my lap top for every thing , I only use a modest 2 GB ram with a 32bit XP OS , now I am a film user but I scan negatives from 35 mm to 8x10 and up to around 150MB files editing with PS7 and I don't have any trouble but a power digital user may find it a bit slow .<br>

I only paid $A400 for this laptop of ebay and it runs like a dream.</p>

<p>Specs are<br>

Dell Latitude D620 with core 2 duo 2GHz ,2GB ram ,256MB dedicated graphics memory .</p>

<p>I do run the dock and external monitor with 1600x900 resolution with no trouble or lag<br>

A faster and more powerful computer will not do any thing any better than this computer , it will just do it faster .</p>

<p>I have seen a lot of people by laptops and never have to take them any place , this is rather silly and unless you need portability you are far better of with a desktop that does give far better bang for buck and is a lot more future proof.<br>

I mainly use a laptop because I really need a laptop</p>

[garrison_k.]

<blockquote>

<p>I find the claims that one needs a wazoo video card to be asuckers game; trhe lay and stupid and dumb fall into this con.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Kelly, I know what you mean! I feel the same about those that are making things up by forming their opinions as fact. Odd how you admit you have no experience with the argument at hand, and can't be bothered to study the documents from adobe and intel on how they have shifted video tasks from the cpu to gpu, and yet claim they are all wrong with their own hardware and architecture.</p>

[andylynn]

 

<p>Kelly is correct. I don't have any benchmarks to show you that GPUs don't matter to Photoshop, because since this is true nobody who does GPU reviews has done a Photoshop benchmark since they first realized they were wasting their time, which was years ago. (You'd see a comparison of time taken to do a bunch of tasks, on the same reference system with several video cards, and the bars in the chart would always be the same size.) The thing is, throwing up some 2D on a display doesn't take much work, so once nVidia, ATi etc. solved the problem they put the real work into 3D.</p>

<p>Even the stuff that newer versions of Photoshop use OpenGL for are really easy things for a GPU to do. Sure, a Geforce GTX 480 or a FireGL v8800 can do them very quickly - but so can a Radeon 5570 at a fraction of the price and low power consumption. Even a midlevel video card can handle this stuff so easily that you'd have to put two reference systems next to each other and try really hard to see the difference. I haven't run the numbers myself either because it's not something worth testing for - all you need is a competent video card without shared memory (which is such a slow thing, it could slow down Microsoft Notepad).</p>

<p>Garrison, I'd advise against using WD Blacks in RAID 0. The reason is they're built to consumer spec but they have multiple processing units to increase speed; the result is they run hotter, and heat is hard drive death. RAID 0 decreases the expected life span because if either drive fails, the whole array fails - my probability math isn't what I used to be but I believe the mean lifetime is reduced by (1-1/SQRT(2)) = 30%, so it's already risky. I'd step up to a server grade hard drive like the WD RE3 or the Hitachi E7K series. And make sure the hard drives have good ventilation.</p>

 

[garrison_k.]

<blockquote>

<p>Kelly is correct.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Really? How so? No one here (in favour of Kelly and Jeff et al) has yet been able to provide any links or benchmarks backing up this claim. No one in the thread is willing to stand up and say that they've installed better vid cards and noticed zero performance difference. Yet on the other side of the fence, there are people that did notice a performance increase. As well, they are able to provide links to benchmark results and Adobe documents saying their products do indeed benefit from better gpu's.</p>

<p>I love learning like a sponge and my ego can handle being wrong. I can say sorry and thank you in the same breath. I just want someone to show me quantifiable data that gpu's are irrelevant to CS4/CS5 performance and I'll shut up. Otherwise I'll trust my empirical evidence that also happens to jive with what Adobe and Intel publishes.</p>

[andylynn]

<p>This is silly and off topic to the OP's question. Anyway, I'm not going to test this but if you want to, knock yourself out. When Kelly and I agree I take that as enough to accept the point, and from previous posts I am confident that Garrison has little or no knowledge of computers, so all that can be gained from continuing is all of us getting annoyed until Garrison runs out of things to say and pretends he was just trolling all along.</p>

[lee_richards2]

<p>Here is the part of the Adobe article that was not posted earlier. Adobe allows a minimum of 128 MB of video memory to operate all of the features of CS5. It recommends 256 mb of video ream. So I went to the Best Buy web site and looked up their cheapest AMD laptop at $349.00. The Machine has ATI's mobility graphics which accesses up to 893MB of memory. Far more than Adobe recommends. Then I looked at the cheapest Intel machine. $369.00. This machine has the Intel 4500m accellerator. It also accesses over 800 mb of video memory. </p>

<p>The machine that the OP is considering is a pretty high end machine. Best Buy's cheapest Core I7 machine has "<strong>NVIDIA GeForce 310M graphics </strong>With 512MB GDDR3 discrete graphics memory and up to 1755MB dynamically allocated shared memory (2267MB total) using NVIDIA TurboCache technology. " By far and away more than CS5 or lightroom will ever require. </p>

<p>So I am siding with Jeff. People who are going out to buy expensive video cards to run PS are wasting good money. You do need an accellerator but almost all of the ones on the market and anything the OP is likely to get on his core I7 machine will far exceed his requirements. </p>

<p>From personal experience I can tell you that my Sony Core duo laptop runs CS4 beautifully.</p>

[Spearhead]

<blockquote>

<p>Per Adobe, "Photoshop CS5 and CS4 leverage the graphics display card's GPU, instead of the computer's main processor (the CPU) to speed its screen redraw". On the link above, they list functions which are directly accelerated by the GPU, many of which are fundamental operations. It's a good read.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>And it says nothing about how it affects performance. There's nothing to show that there's a difference between how it works with any two relatively modern graphics cards. If there's data, where is it?</p>

[garrison_k.]

<blockquote>

<p>And it says nothing about how it affects performance.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>How about a link or two to an article saying it doesn't? Should be easy to find and would be refreshing to balance the debate about now. Or anything, from anyone, saying an $80 vid card provides the same photoshop performance as a $300 card?</p>

<p>My experience is that it helps tremendously. I'm not really sure how you benchmark the wait time for a previews to render or how fast or slow brushes respond, or an image rotates when dealing with a 800 meg image with 14 layers? Nevertheless, there's plenty of links saying parallel processing between GPU and CPU does make a difference since CS4. I tend to agree with Adobe's fluff here:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Many of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications have enhanced features designed to take advantage of your display card's GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to accelerate application performance. The GPU is a dedicated graphics rendering chip that may be integrated into the computer motherboard or attached to a separate video display card and is very efficient at manipulating and outputting computer graphics. The extra processing power of the GPU makes some effects and accelerated rendering possible that would otherwise require extraordinary CPU (Central Processing Unit) speeds and large amounts of RAM. If a supported GPU is detected during launch, the application will take advantage of this added processing power.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405445.html</p>

<p> </p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>GPU = Graphics Processing Unit</p>

<p>Wow, you can't hang around these threads and not learn<em> something</em> new every day.</p>

<p>I thought that it was a typo at first. . . .</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[andrewcampbell]

<p>My laptop has served me fine. (Dell Inspiron 1720) Check out my page if you like. All were done on that computer.</p>

[shooters_desirein]

<p>My base computer is a desktop as well that i built but i am going to have a dell 600 beefed up for teathering on the field. Hope it works. 14.1 size with dvd drive as well. All i want it for is to transfer files off my camera flash till i get home to transfer over on a usb memory stick. Something i havn't done yet but i may sell this one to get a 12" mac. Whats your thoughts on that...David</p>

[riclan]

<p>I can tell you this: my actual laptop Inspiron 6400 DualCore 1.8 with 2 gigs RAM (almost 3 years old) cannot run Lightroom properly. It doesn't crash but when I wait a few seconds for an adjustment to apply on the picture, It's difficult to photoedit correctly.</p>

 

[shooters_desirein]

<p>Richard a simple step in cleaning out your memory before you run lightroom also how big is your hard drive> how much memory do you have and your video card how much ram dedicated to video? all these things need to be put into consideration. Soomeone who can possibly work with you online and has access to your computer for a small fee could help you out with all this and save you the cost of bring your computer into a tech shop</p>

[riclan]

<p>David : I've got 160 Gigs HD, 58 Gigs still free. I don't think that my video card has some ram onboard. I could try to finetune to dedicate ram to the video. But it's about it. I think that Lightroom 3 needs more muscle to operate. <br>

I've got absolutely no problem running Photoshop Element 7. It's just that I discover LR3 and I love it.</p>

[shooters_desirein]

<p>i believe your problem lies in the processor, Why? because its a level 1 cache. See how much it would be to get one with level 2 cache. If this was AMD i could help you out better but its Intel i would just either google your model no. and see what upgrades you have available. A lot depends on your motherboard but you can allicate more ram in your Bios. Also in system properties. My problem i have with lightroom is sometimes if i'm on there a while it locks up and i have to free up memory by rebooting and i have 4 gig</p>

[lachaine]

<p>It's surprising how capable and fast an older computer, laptop or desktop, can be when you turn off all the unnecessary crap that runs in the background. I easily work with the raw files from a 10 megapixel camera on my almost 4 year old laptop. It only has an AMD 1.8 mhz processor and 1 gig of ram. I simply have it configured as minimally as possible, and I avoid running many programs at the same time when I'm working on images. But I do use a separate, larger monitor. I also try to avoid bloatware programs if there's an alternative. It's like the cameras themselves... the industry depends on making people think they need more than what they already have.</p>

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