Is an 8800GTS essential for Photoshopping/video production?

[RU482]

My boss recently bought a fairly high end Dell XPS 720 for his office PC. As a component of the PC, he got an 8800GTS video card. His justification being that he does a fair amount of photoshoping and a little bit of video editing on his PC.

Two of the side effects of this are 1. the video card fan is loud and 2. you can feel heat coming from the PC. Neither of which he is very fond of.

Is a high end graphics card like this essential for what he is using his PC for, or is the 8800 GTS geared exclusively for gaming performance? (which he does none)


Would he see any decrease in performance in photoshop by downgrading to an 8600GT or the like?

 

[slugg]

Last time I checked, all those applications are CPU and memory intensive, not video card intensive. The video programs use your video card for hardware acceleration, but it doesn't "flex its muscles" so to speak. A passively cooled 8600GT, or even something slower like a 7600 GS, would be FINE.

 

[sgrinavi]

The video memory is nice to have for those apps, but speed wise it's a waste... I didn't notice one shread of improvement in photoshop or premier when I went from my 6800 GT 512 MB to the 8800GTX

OTOH, when I went from a 256MB 6800 GT to the 512 there was a significant and noticable improvement in performance when editing large images.

 

[mruffin75]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi
The video memory is nice to have for those apps, but speed wise it's a waste... I didn't notice one shread of improvement in photoshop or premier when I went from my 6800 GT 512 MB to the 8800GTX

OTOH, when I went from a 256MB 6800 GT to the 512 there was a significant and noticable improvement in performance when editing large images.

I doubt that the memory increase on your video card had any impact on performance.. basically the only thing that photoshop/premiere pro uses video memory for is for the same reason as every other application...just the video display..

Photoshop doesn't use your video memory for any purpose..neither does Premiere (except for maybe a few GPU based transitions..but that's hardly any)...

images are edited in main computer memory...which has no impact on which video card you have...

In short...no...the 8800GTS is not justified..

Would he see any decrease in performance in photoshop by downgrading to an 8600GT or the like?

Not at all.

 

[BladeVenom]

Not needed. The only thing you might want is a midrange card like the 2600xt for video decoding for watching hi def video formats.

 

[qbfx]

As everyone says, you don't need to spend that much money on the video, better spend some more on ram and then cpu. As for the video card, get a card that can deliver accurate colors - I think ati's are still better in terms of color reproduction.

 

[Soundmanred]

Originally posted by: redly1
My boss recently bought a fairly high end Dell XPS 720 for his office PC. As a component of the PC, he got an 8800GTS video card. His justification being that he does a fair amount of photoshoping and a little bit of video editing on his PC.

Two of the side effects of this are 1. the video card fan is loud and 2. you can feel heat coming from the PC. Neither of which he is very fond of.

Is a high end graphics card like this essential for what he is using his PC for, or is the 8800 GTS geared exclusively for gaming performance? (which he does none)


Would he see any decrease in performance in photoshop by downgrading to an 8600GT or the like?

No, you can switch out your 8600GT for his card and he will never know the difference.
Go on, you know that's why you asked...we won't tell...

 

[orbiter]

I use PS CS3 Extended version quite a lot for graphics design and photography and I've found that you don't really need a top end graphics card for it to function generaly. I've used a 7600GS, a 7950GT and now have a 8800GT installed on my system and hardly notice a difference whilst using CS3.

On a side note though CS3 Extended does have the ability to work with video and 3D content so a reasonable piece of graphics hardware will help.

 

[TemjinGold]

Originally posted by: Soundmanred

Originally posted by: redly1
My boss recently bought a fairly high end Dell XPS 720 for his office PC. As a component of the PC, he got an 8800GTS video card. His justification being that he does a fair amount of photoshoping and a little bit of video editing on his PC.

Two of the side effects of this are 1. the video card fan is loud and 2. you can feel heat coming from the PC. Neither of which he is very fond of.

Is a high end graphics card like this essential for what he is using his PC for, or is the 8800 GTS geared exclusively for gaming performance? (which he does none)


Would he see any decrease in performance in photoshop by downgrading to an 8600GT or the like?

No, you can switch out your 8600GT for his card and he will never know the difference.
Go on, you know that's why you asked...we won't tell...

He might even give you a raise for taking care of the noise issue... :thumbsup:

 

[sgrinavi]

Originally posted by: mruffin75

Originally posted by: sgrinavi
The video memory is nice to have for those apps, but speed wise it's a waste... I didn't notice one shread of improvement in photoshop or premier when I went from my 6800 GT 512 MB to the 8800GTX

OTOH, when I went from a 256MB 6800 GT to the 512 there was a significant and noticable improvement in performance when editing large images.

I doubt that the memory increase on your video card had any impact on performance.. basically the only thing that photoshop/premiere pro uses video memory for is for the same reason as every other application...just the video display..

You can doubt all you like; I was there before the change and after it... it made a significant difference. Both cards were of the same gen and both brand new.

 

[erple2]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi

Originally posted by: mruffin75

Originally posted by: sgrinavi
The video memory is nice to have for those apps, but speed wise it's a waste... I didn't notice one shread of improvement in photoshop or premier when I went from my 6800 GT 512 MB to the 8800GTX

OTOH, when I went from a 256MB 6800 GT to the 512 there was a significant and noticable improvement in performance when editing large images.

I doubt that the memory increase on your video card had any impact on performance.. basically the only thing that photoshop/premiere pro uses video memory for is for the same reason as every other application...just the video display..

You can doubt all you like; I was there before the change and after it... it made a significant difference. Both cards were of the same gen and both brand new.

I was speaking with a co-worker recently about something similar. He is very much into video editing on his computer (he does SCUBA diving, with videos he transfers to DVDs on his PC). He has a fairly decent computer for that sort of thing (dual core P4, 3 gigs RAM), and he noticed a substantial increase in the performance of the decoding when he went from some onboard intel based graphics card to my old ATI 9600 Pro that I gave him. He said it was about 1/3-1/2 faster to do the decoding. It appears that some applications in the non-3D game world are starting to take advantage of the advanced Pixel Processing units on modern (DX9+) graphics cards.

If Photoshop is one of those applications, then I could see how getting some more RAM on the 6800 GT might give you a boost in performance. Wasn't the 256 meg version a 64/128 bit interface, and the 512 meg version a 128/256bit?

I dunno.

 

[MegaVovaN]

6800GT was never released with 64 bit bus.
There was 128 and 256 mb version, I never heard of 512 mb 6800GT

256 version had 256 bit bus.
I know because I have 6800GT 256bit/256mb AGP.

edit: nevermind, 512 mb 6800GT does exist.