Graphics card in laptops

k3wt · 7 Dec 2009 at 09:14

How important is a graphics card in a laptop for things like Photoshop and rendering tasks? Will the difference in display performance be really noticable in say refresh rate and how much difference in say render speed? i dont game so thats ok.

eg.

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory

OR

NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 memory

TIA

Rozzy85 · 7 Dec 2009 at 09:30

The performance of Photoshop will run purely on the speed of the CPU and the amount of RAM you have unless the latest version now uses GPU acceleration.

Tripnologist · 7 Dec 2009 at 10:03

CS4 does use the GPU to some extent but nothing too major. Mostly cosmetic.

http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-tips/super-handy-photoshop-cs4-gpu-features-unraveled/

OspreyO · 8 Dec 2009 at 01:16

3D cards are meant to be faster in CS4. But I couldn't find any benchmarks on it. I wouldn't go with either of those cards though, as theres been issues with them.

k3wt · 8 Dec 2009 at 01:17

well theyre the ones in the Macbook pro

i want the 13 inch one because its more portable but thats the one without a dedicated card. just weighing up whether one with a card is much, much better and wont 'lag'