Nvidia vs ATI GPUs for Photoshop

SMed · 23 Nov 2011 at 13:36

OK so I've read that nvidia cards run better with CS5 than ATI due to CUDA. But am I right in thinking this is only relevant with 3D stuff? If I'm going to just be processing 2D photos will I see any added performance benefit with cuda/nvidia?

Thanks.

PistolPete · 23 Nov 2011 at 14:51

My understanding is that CUDA can be used to utilise the GPU for any processing to offload the CPU.

If you are using lots of heavyweight plugins, or lots of CPU intensive processing it might be better with an Nvidia card.

clintham · 23 Nov 2011 at 15:26

i have only ever had 1 ATI card and it was a real PITA. never touched them since, nvidia all the way. i forget what model, it was a few years back but it cost me over £450 and made all my games crash and PS run slower than my old card.

they might have got thier act together by now but i will never go back *waits for the ATI fan boys to gang up*

Demon · 23 Nov 2011 at 16:27

SMed said:
OK so I've read that nvidia cards run better with CS5 than ATI due to CUDA. But am I right in thinking this is only relevant with 3D stuff? If I'm going to just be processing 2D photos will I see any added performance benefit with cuda/nvidia?

Thanks.

CUDA is for accelerating anything.. since GPU's have fantastic number crunching power, it's now common to start offloading calculations to the graphics cards.

I'd suspect this is what Photoshop is doing, so technically length 'processing' could be greatly accelerated.

If it only supports CUDA, then I'd obviously get an NVidia card...

I've got several applications that use CUDA or STREAM (ATI's equivalent)or OpenCL even (A more generic standard) to accelerate encoding/decoding of video/audio etc, and the difference is amazing.. much faster..

*waits for the ATI fan boys to gang up*

I've switched between ATI/NVidia for years, they both have their issues every now and again, I've never wasted my money on either.. I have reasonable ATI and NVidia cards at the moment, both are excellent.

An Exception · 23 Nov 2011 at 16:57

CUDA is useless at the moment from a consumer perspective and will likely be a legacy standard before too long.

Photoshop doesn't use it (and never will since Apple doesn't use Nvidia anymore), the only 3rd party plugin I can think of that uses it is useless and just blurs the skin texture.

What Photoshop does use is Open GL that works pretty much any GPU that supports open GL (pretty much every Nvidia or ATi card).

And as for the poster above raving about video encoding, CUDA is less than useless as the quality is beyond poor, and ATi's implementation still isn't as good as the good old CPU.

Seems like allot of folks have been suckered in by the hype...

neil_g · 23 Nov 2011 at 16:58

id check Adobes compatible cards list on their site, last i checked it was a limited amount of models.

An Exception · 23 Nov 2011 at 17:00

^^^
If the card supports Open GL it should work in PS, and the card is only used to draw what's on the screen, no heavy duty calc's are done other than that.
If you disable Open GL support you basically get a block view of the image if you are zoomed at an odd magnification like 66%.
100% 50% 25% 12% are all fine.

SMed · 24 Nov 2011 at 10:02

Thanks a lot guys, very helpful. I guess I don't need to worry so much about using an ATI card with Photoshop.

Not so sure about running one in Linux though.

sarge78 · 24 Nov 2011 at 11:24

An Exception said:
And as for the poster above raving about video encoding, CUDA is less than useless as the quality is beyond poor, and ATi's implementation still isn't as good as the good old CPU.

Seems like allot of folks have been suckered in by the hype...

Quick Sync is awesome and shows what can be done.

OpenCL seems to be taking off (Capture One etc)

An Exception · 24 Nov 2011 at 15:45

^^^
Yes quick sync is awesome (quality nearly as good as CPU and still fast) as it had it's own transistors dedicated to transcoding, but AMD's video encoding is nowhere near as good, and Nvidia's CUDA is a steaming pile of you know what.
The problem with CUDA/STEAM is most calc's still need to be done on the CPU, and to save time in Nvidia's case they just cut massive corners in quality.
Having heard Nvidia harping on about this 8x GPU speed up, I was very disappointed to see that was a load of **** and that the quality was **** on both my 460 + 470.

With regards to Open CL, yes that will be the de-facto standard soon, Apple has quite literally killed CUDA like they killed flash.

An Exception · 24 Nov 2011 at 15:50

SMed said:
Thanks a lot guys, very helpful. I guess I don't need to worry so much about using an ATI card with Photoshop.

Not so sure about running one in Linux though.

There wouldn't be ANY reason to worry, but then I see your running Linux. I don't run Linux but heard there can be allot of issues with games etc. with AMD cards.