Photoshop GPU Upgrade for 6300 Budget Build

[Arthaei]

Hi guys I have a budget build I’ve tweaked with some surprisingly decent performance for an old system, it’s likely going to my Dad who will predominantly use it for Photoshop and possibly Lightroom work.

Spec is:
ASUs M5A78L-M LX
Amd FX-6300 (overclocked to 4.3ghz)
Hyper X Fury 1866mhz DDR3 16gb ram
Samsung Evo 870 QVO 1TB Ssd
OCZ ModXStream 500w psu
Win 10

It currently has a HD Radeon 6950 2GB gpu in it which I did swap out for a GTX 1070 8GB and it’s great, but I think it’s bottlenecked too much in this system particularly once going above to 1440p res for gaming, so I'm thinking of plugging the 6950 back in as gaming won’t matter to him but Adobe performance will. I’m intending to use the 1070 in a different system.

I don’t want to spend much more money with this build really so I’m wondering what GPU I could pair with it which is going to improve Photoshop 2019 performance or if the 6950 is sufficient?. I’ve seen the GTX 1050ti and GTX 970 and wondering if it is worth going that route.

I’m not building anything new or interested in a new modern budget build as I’ve already upgraded and an old system I paid next to nothing for, so it’s just this GPU question I’m a bit stuck on now.

Thanks for any input!

 

[Tetras]

Not easy to find information for cards that old, this seems to suggest that there's little benefit from anything above a 1060 in Photoshop 2019.

"Since Photoshop is relatively light in the way of GPU acceleration, the RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti probably aren't worth purchasing simply for their raw performance. They are technically among the fastest GPUs we have ever tested for Photoshop, but they are only 8% faster than a humble GTX 1060."

"Something to keep in mind is that while the RTX GPUs are not necessary for Photoshop today, there is a chance that they will be better in the future. These cards have new types of cores (RT and Tensor cores) that could potentially have significant performance advantages for some tasks. Or, they might never be used in Photoshop at all. It really comes down to whether or not the Photoshop developers are willing or able to make effectively use of these new features. With how much Adobe is investing in Machine Learning with their Adobe Sensei program, our guess is that at least the Tensor cores will eventually be leveraged in some way, but whether it will happen in Photoshop CC 2020 or Photoshop CC 2030 is unknown at the moment.

Overall, the RTX cards are likely more powerful than you would ever need for Photoshop, but if you already need a high-end GPU for other applications (Premiere Pro, GPU-based rendering, etc.) we would highly recommend using one of these RTX cards over the older GTX series if possible. Exactly which GPU to choose, however, it going to be largely decided by those other applications rather than Photoshop."

Photoshop CC 2019: NVIDIA GeForce RTX Performance

Photoshop uses the video card to accelerate a number of tasks, but a high end GPU is rarely necessary to get great performance. Do the RTX cards follow this trend in the latest version of Photoshop CC 2019, or will we finally see a reason to use a high-end GPU?

www.pugetsystems.com

Content creation / GPU rendering 'n stuff wasn't generally included in benchmarks prior to Pascal, so I'm not sure where to look for comparisons with a 6950, 970 or 1050 Ti.

If you need the 1070 for something else, I'd just stick the 6950 back in and see how he finds it. If you don't get any complaints then I guess it is fine.

 

[tamzzy]

photoshop = strong cpu + some random nvidia card with cuda cores (any will do)

 

[Arthaei]

Thanks both, that was my gut feeling too. I will put the 6950 back in and hopefully with the overclock and the nippy ssd it should be alright. I would put 32gb ram in but the board won’t take it. I’m thinking I might pick-up an old 4TB mechanical drive for extra photo storage for him too perhaps.