GFX card for art ??

Moonpie2

Moonpie2

Moonpie2

Soldato
Joined
23 Dec 2002
Posts
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Shiny Shanghai
Hello there.

I am wangling together some PC specs for a friend who's going to be doing a reasonable amount of art stuff, photoshop, video editing etc.. and I realised I have no idea if the quality of the gfx card will help any for this.

Soooo....... do you need a good card for art stuff or could I just get a cheap and cheerful 30 jobby ?

Cheers
 
Rendering images/photos/videos is exactly what a graphics card does. The better your graphics card, the more overall performace you'll get when doing your ART activities.
 
Well that's what I would have thought, but after doing some googling, it seems that GFX cards are very 'specific' in the things they do and also not all art packages are optimised to make use of GPUs.

So I'm getting contradictory messages from many different places.

I wonder, do you use art packages (Photoshop, illustrator etc..) ?
 
You're only going to get better performance if the software you're using takes advantage of the graphics card (e.g. offloading rendering from the CPU to the GPU) - if the software doesn't offload it then a £10 graphics card will perform the same as a £500 one.

Photoshop CS4 onwards supports GPU acceleration.
 
Ok, so specifically, what is it about the GFX card that the compatible programs use ?

The core speed ?
Number of cores ?
The amount of memory ?
The memory clock ?
 
Some video editing apps make use of nVidia CUDA but it's not worth it, the quality is not up to scratch. Same for quick sync on Sandybridge CPUs.

Just get a solid CPU in there and don't worry about the GPU acceleration. A modern i5/7 eats Photoshop alive anyway.

A good monitor for excellent colour reproduction is far more important than the GPU, a £500 GPU will not make your art work better in ANY way. It's a display outout device only when not providing acceleration.
 
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