When running programs like Photoshop and Lightroom, how important is it to have a powerful video / graphics card? I have trouble with LR especially, but PS slows a lot sometimes, too.
I'm running:
Windows XP
4GB RAM
Intel Dual Core CPU 6400 @ 2.13 GHz
NVIDIA GEForce 7300 LE Graphics Card
Your video card is fast enough. Photoshop under Windows can make use of a good gpu... but it does not really need much power. Having 256 megs of RAM on the card can help if your working with very high resolution multilayered files. One of my systems has an onboard video card with shared RAM and it does fine with photoshop. But I can tell a difference between it and another system I use with has a dedicated video card. But that is mostly with screen redaws and not overall photoshop performance.
Your slowdown could be a lot of things. Other software running, hard drive subsystem, etc.
If it locks up then could be a database issue within lightroom or even possibly a bad sector on the hard drive. If the videocard was the cause of the lockup (overheat)then it would lock up in photoshop as well or even just on the desktop.
Most photo viewing comprises looking at a single image at a time, and not needing to swap between images very quickly. It's totally different in that regard from videos/movies which have to rewrite the whole screen many times per second over long periods of time. It's also quite different from games in which artificial elements are created and must then be drawn and coloured in or shaded by the graphics card.
Therefore the video card has a low impact on PS onece it is good enough to display a whole screen full of data (e.g. mine is 1920x1200 pixels) and refresh it as fast as required (60Hz for LCDs; up to about 85Hz for CRTs).
Slow-downs are more likely due to poor program settings, lack of allocated memory, other programs or OS tasks running simultaneously, etc.
dan727 wrote:
[...]
Your slowdown could be a lot of things. Other software running, hard drive subsystem, etc.
Very well put. Look to see what is using your memory, is your paging file permanent or system managed. What kind of disks are you using? Fragmention can have a big effect on Windows peformance.
I was having lockups in LR, loaded new video drivers and no more lockups.
Video drivers cause more than 80% of software problems/crashes so its worth a try.
WAYCOOL wrote:
I was having lockups in LR, loaded new video drivers and no more lockups.
Video drivers cause more than 80% of software problems/crashes so its worth a try.
Thanks. I actually downloaded the latest driver for my card, and then had all kinds of other problems. But this is likely because I have two cards to run two monitors. I will be getting a new dual-monitor card and wanted to know if I need to go for a powerful one. Sounds like I don't but a new card with new driver might fix my problem.
