About the role of graphic card

[tomt]

I'm no expert, but I think that the GPU is the most important, followed by Ram, followed by the graphics card. I'm currently running a Windows XP system with a 3.2 Pent 4 chip, I Gig of ram,
and an ATI Radeon 300 cardwith 128 Mbytes of ram.

I'm plenty fast enough in Photoshop, but wish I was a little faster in Painter, especially with large file sizes and the digital watercolors brushes. My speed is limited though to the GPU I think. I have enough ram to keep from writing to a virtual file, which seemed to take forever back when I had 512 meg of ram. I've been told that the Nvidia card with 256 Meg of ram is a better choice than my ATI, but haven't heard why.
Most new computers I've seen and priced come with 128 with an upgrade available to the Nvidia or ATI at 256. Hope this helps, remember this is from a non expert.

[acmepixel]

2D programs like Photoshop and Painter rely more on CPU, RAM and contiguous disk space on a very fast hard drive. 3D programs and video games need fast GPU's with lots of video RAM for processing Open GL effects and real-time polygon rendering. Photoshop and Painter are specifically designed to run without the need for a high-end card.

If you are using primarily a 2D program or even a 2.5D program like ZBrush, a fast Motherboard with a fast front and back side Bus, tuned to a fast (preferably multiple) CPU, with at least 4Gigs of RAM and at lease one 10,000rpm SATA drive will give you faster performance than a High-End Graphics Card.

The new Mac Pro is a perfect example of a maxed-out, 2D "muscle machine", that has a variety of GPU cards to tailor to the users needs. It is built from the ground up for "pushing pixels". So you want to look for a machine that has similar specs.

The High-End GPU's run in the $1500.00-$5,000.00, range and are targeted to 3D users and High-volume Video Effects producers.

So get a Photoshop/Painter "muscle machine" and you can always add a high-end card later, if you want to dabble in 3D. (in the case of the MacPro the ATI card is a better bang for the buck).

[Laurindo]

Thanks, guys
It seems, that GPU comes after CPU & RAM. AcmePixel, you mentioned Mac Pro, and that is just what i have been thinking to get (I'm now in g4)!

For me all that get Painter's performance high is important and I don't want any part of the system being a bottleneck, wasting the capacity of the others.
So if I get Mac Pro 2.66 with 2 gig RAM (or should it be 4 gig?), you think this 7300 GT would be good enough for now, being so cheap it could be easily replaced if needed later? ATI is not too expensive, but if I don't get any real boost for Painter with it...and it has a fan and possibly some noise...

L.

[acmepixel]

A good rule of thumb for current 2D apps is at least 128 Megs of video Ram. If you want to also run 3D apps like Poser 6 or Hexagon, Cinema 4D or Lightwave, etc. then you will want a card with at lease 256 Megs. 512megs is on the current mid to high end cards (and is preferred).

Of course, with a Mac Pro you have plenty of slots, considering that you can drive two monitors with most modern card offerings. ( I have two cards driving 3 monitors, with 2 slots left over).

As for ram, you can never have enough.

The biggest ''bottleneck'' will always be ones wallet. ;-)

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.