Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: petermarrek on July 22, 2008, 07:58:10 am

Title: How much RAM?
Post by: petermarrek on July 22, 2008, 07:58:10 am

Have a 8core powermac with 9 gigs of RAM. Will an extra 4 gigs make a real world difference? Question is for people who have been there, I know that more is better.

Title: How much RAM?
Post by: Schewe on July 22, 2008, 11:01:50 am

Not unless you have the habit of running a _LOT_ of apps at once. In effect, each app is gonna be limited to less than 4 gigs so with Photoshop running and needing 4 gigs and Bridge running–which uses ram differently and tops off at about 2 gigs, that would still leave about 3 gigs more or less free. However, if you are running other apps that are also ram hungry (Like Illustrator or InDesign or even Safari) adding a few more gigs could be beneficial...

If there is a LOT of free ram and you download and install ForceVM.plugin you can make use of ram beyond the 4 gig limit. See this story Forve VM Buffering (http://photoshopnews.com/2007/05/29/photoshop-cs3-vm-buffering-optional-extensions-mac-only/). So, for Photoshop CS3 only, there would be a benefit to adding more ram. I run a MacPro with 16 gigs of ram with the Force VM plug-in as well as having my PS scratch disk on a stripped array partition and Photoshop's pretty darn fast.