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Help deciding

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15 Feb 2008
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Looking to upgrade my graphics card as my 4870 broke so i am currently using a 2600xt which feels a little slower. I don't do much gaming so don't need huge amount of power but use photoshop a lot so needs a bit of power behind it.


Got around £200, so any ideas.
 
Hmmm, well if your only looking for light gaming then maybe one of the cheap 460's would be good?

Nvidia gpu's also have cuda so that will be helpfull for photoshop.

If on the other hand you want to spend all your budget on the best card possible, then a 5850 for under £200 , a 470 for just over £200 (can be found else where) or wait to see what happens from the ATI 6000 series due soon....
 
i don't know why so many people recommmend the 470, its a hot blowly card that's a power drain running on old tech. Get a HAWK for £40 less and clock it to the same speed
 
i don't know why so many people recommmend the 470, its a hot blowly card that's a power drain running on old tech. Get a HAWK for £40 less and clock it to the same speed
Because comparing at stock speed the 607MHz GTX470 is around 20% and over faster than a 675MHz GTX460 1GB? Sure a GTX460 1GB can overclock from 675MHz to around 800~850Mhz...over 900MHz if lucky enough land a nice core, but a GTX470 can overclocked from 607MHz to 820~850MHz. Also, the performance gain on the overclock: performance ratio is greater on the GTX470, plus GTX460 1GB's GF104 architecture cut down on tessellations performance comparing to the GF100.
 
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never looked at the new nvidia cards as always bout ATI.

Res would be 1920*1080

Also forgot to mention that i do a fair bit of HD encoding ect
 
never looked at the new nvidia cards as always bout ATI.

Res would be 1920*1080

Also forgot to mention that i do a fair bit of HD encoding ect

Don't get anything, new ATI cards are coming out very soon, about a month and you don't want to spend £200 now only to find something better for the same price, or the same for less.

Also, for photoshop, CUDA isn't a requirement, as Photoshop's own/internal GPU acceleration is OpenGL not CUDA so you don't have to use an nVidia card to get it.
 
Don't get anything, new ATI cards are coming out very soon, about a month and you don't want to spend £200 now only to find something better for the same price, or the same for less.

Also, for photoshop, CUDA isn't a requirement, as Photoshop's own/internal GPU acceleration is OpenGL not CUDA so you don't have to use an nVidia card to get it.

That is perfectly correct. However the only reason why there is a preference for Nvidia with Adobe software is simply becuase it is what is advertised.

So for no other reason, I presume this is what they test and support.

Im sure ATI gpu's also work perfectly fine as well.
 
Also, for photoshop, CUDA isn't a requirement, as Photoshop's own/internal GPU acceleration is OpenGL not CUDA so you don't have to use an nVidia card to get it.

it seems there is a CUDA plug-in you can download for Photoshop also which I'm guessing gives a bit of a boost over the OpenGL acceleration
 
it seems there is a CUDA plug-in you can download for Photoshop also which I'm guessing gives a bit of a boost over the OpenGL acceleration

There is a CUDA plugin for other stuff, I was talking about the one Photoshop uses as standard.
 
That is perfectly correct. However the only reason why there is a preference for Nvidia with Adobe software is simply because it is what is advertised.

So for no other reason, I presume this is what they test and support.

Im sure ATI gpus also work perfectly fine as well.

Very much so, Photoshop GPU acceleration works great with my 5870, and worked just as well with my 4850s too. Though to be fair, the adobe website makes it very clear what cards work with it and what cards don't.
 
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