Does the GPU really matter for photography?

[Alan Goldhammer]

Yes, the card is essential if you want to see something on your screen.     But as Jeff said, Lr doesn't yet use the GPU for rendering acceleration.

Hmmmm, since I mainly use LR I could have saved myself a cool $170 by sticking with Intel Ivy Bridge graphics and left the NIVIDIA GeForce card back at the cash register!

[Bill Koenig]

So the question is, do I go with a currant (PCIe 3.0) mid range GPU now, which PhotoShop can take advantage of, but Lightroom currently can't, but possibly might down the road, and spend $450. Or go with something for $100, and wait?
I'm planing a build using the same X79/ i3930k 6-core package, 32 gigs of DDR3 1600 PC3-12800 quad channel ram.
The card I'm looking at is a AMD FirePro W5000.


AMD FirePro™ W5000 supports DisplayPort 1.2 with a max resolution of 4096x2160, can drive three displays at once, features 2GB GDDR5 memory, a 256-bit memory interface and 102.3 GB/s memory bandwidth.

BTW, for what's it's worth, it does 10 bit color, and I have a NEC PA271W

[Steve House]

So the question is, do I go with a currant (PCIe 3.0) mid range GPU now, which PhotoShop can take advantage of, but Lightroom currently can't, but possibly might down the road, and spend $450. Or go with something for $100, and wait?
I'm planing a build using the same X79/ i3930k 6-core package, 32 gigs of DD3 1600 quad channel ram.
The card I'm looking at is a AMD FirePro W5000....BTW, for what's it's worth, it does 10 bit color, and I have a NEC PA271W

Looking at a very similar build but going with an nVidia card because I want to get good performance with video editing in Premiere as well as LR and PS and Premiere doesn't play as nice with AMD video cards.  Just pulled the trigger tonight on a new Dell U2713h wide-gamut monitor.  Still trying to decide between nVidia GTX 680, Titan, or Quadro k5000 ... most likely going with the 680.  Couple of SSDs for OS, apps, and scratch/cache files anda couple of terabytes conventional drives for data storage.  Now trying to decide on a case, power supply, and cooling options as audio recording and editing is also a priority and so as near silent operation as possible is a must.  What are your thoughts on that?

[Bill Koenig]

Looking at a very similar build but going with an nVidia card because I want to get good performance with video editing in Premiere as well as LR and PS and Premiere doesn't play as nice with AMD video cards.  Just pulled the trigger tonight on a new Dell U2713h wide-gamut monitor.  Still trying to decide between nVidia GTX 680, Titan, or Quadro k5000 ... most likely going with the 680.  Couple of SSDs for OS, apps, and scratch/cache files anda couple of terabytes conventional drives for data storage.  Now trying to decide on a case, power supply, and cooling options as audio recording and editing is also a priority and so as near silent operation as possible is a must.  What are your thoughts on that?

Yes, for video editing with Premiere, nVidia is the way to go, and I don't think you can go wrong with the GTX 680.

As for power supply, something from Seasonic, with the 680 I would go with at least 750 watts.

With a X79 MB I would go with a Full Tower case. I've looked at the following cases, but I'm still on the fence as to which one.


Rosewill THOR V2-White Edition, THOR V2-W Gaming ATX Full Tower Computer Case, support up to E-ATX / XL-ATX, come with Four Fans

COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Black Steel/ Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case

Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced Full Tower Case with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (RC-932-KKN5-GP)

The  Core i7 3930 doesn't come with a heat sink, if you want something silent, go with liquid cooling, $100 will get you something good, and will easily fit inside one of the case's listed above.

[brandtb]

Looking at a very similar build but going with an nVidia card because I want to get good performance with video editing in Premiere as well as LR and PS

Passing along some partial specs from a new post workstation Colin Rich is building (cine/still photographer - some work at end link for reference)

Win7-64/Pro - 6 core 3.8ghz i7 1 terabyte of solid state for footy, 256 for system, 64gigs of sd3@ 1800, 6 tb of dump space for past present and future footy. 2 dell 27" ultrasharps, GeForce GTX 680 FTW 4GB 256-bit. (btw Colin a long time post-workflow Mac user, "closing the door on Mac" as he put it, "not going to pay the Apple tax anymore")

[Alan Goldhammer]

(btw Colin a long time post-workflow Mac user, "closing the door on Mac" as he put it, "not going to pay the Apple tax anymore")

Funniest statement that I've read read this week!!!

[hjulenissen]

There's a fundamental reason why GPU for 3D is a totally different story than using GPU for dedicated image processing routines that takes over from the cpu. Routines sent to GPU must be optimized for specific and special image processing–which may be different than cpu processing. Which means stuff has to be written to run on GPU...that's the problem. GPUs were designed to run image processing routines, they were designed for 3D and gaming...

GPUs have no doubt been hyped as Nvidia (and ATI/AMD) see that the space for dedicated PC graphics is slowly being decimated by "good enough" integrated graphics, and the old core GPU enthusiasts (gamers) may have been slowly drifting to consoles and phones/tablets (in the latter, other GPU vendors seems to own the market).

I do think that there is considerable overlap between what is needed in an image processing intensive app vs what is offered by modern GPUs hardware-wise. It makes sense that "Photoshop for iPad 8" would use GPU resources to improve IQ, reduce latency and improve battery life. But then you are writing a single app for known hardware. Writing for ever-changing and fragmented PC systems is something different. It may be hard to do a gradual transition as this would mean dumping data to/from GPU multiple times. I don't know the complexity of something like the Photoshop image pipeline, but I imagine that it would be significant. Porting something like that to CUDA/OpenCL, debugging it, taking care of minor appearance differences for a large list of GPU models and driver revisions sounds like a lot of pain to me.

So perhaps the solution is to let the image processing experts and low-level coding gurus do their thing on multi-core Intel hardware instead, opting for more features/IQ per dollar, and advice customers to upgrade their x86 cpu more often and to more expensive models.

-h

[george2787]

I don't know about anything too techie, but read earlier this week that Nvidia has announced the 7XX family with a little more power at aprox the same price... if I recall correctly the new 770 was sightly faster than the current 680 at a lower price and power consumption, and the 780 was 10-15% faster at about same price.

May be worth to look for the info and maybe wait until they hit the stores or maybe get a discount on the current 6xx being discontinued

[Alan Goldhammer]

Of bigger importance are the new Haswell processors from Intel which have much improved graphics on the CPU.  I've just briefly scanned some reviews and have seen a PS benchmark being used to assess them.  If the graphics are indeed up to snuff NVIDIA stands to lose users.

[StephaneB]

I find the Nik plugins barely usable without a good GPU. The real-time refresh when one moves the sliders is offloaded to the GPU. Without a GPU, the refresh is glacially slow.

[Alistair]

(btw Colin a long time post-workflow Mac user, "closing the door on Mac" as he put it, "not going to pay the Apple tax anymore")

I am running Win 8 on my latest build and am very happy with it - it does the job extremely well.

I use mainly LR with a bit of CS5 on the side. Only PS CS6 makes material use of GPU so I am running only a low end GPU card and it is fine. I use a 4 core i7-3820 at 3.6Ghz on an X79 board with 32Gb of 1600 quad channel memory. I was prepared to upgrade the chip to a 6 core but I hardly ever see more than 50% so I feel going beyond the 3820 may not be money well spent. Spend the money on fast I/O as that is what kills LR. However LR never seems to need more than 16Gb memory but PS is a hog so I will put another 32Gb in at some stage as I frequently use 4-5Gb stitched image files.  I use closed circuit cooling and never see more than 40 C and that is only after a lot of preview renderings. If you are using a big GPU then you need a big PS. Otherwise a good quality 600-650 is fine.

That's what works for me anyway.