SLI any help?

CB
Posted By
Chris Brooks
Aug 21, 2006
Views
472
Replies
10
Status
Closed
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one (I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

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H
HTech
Aug 21, 2006
"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one (I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Put as much RAM into your computer as your motherboard supports. Memory is cheap nowadays and Photoshop (CS2) eats RAM for breakfast. If you have a second Harddrive, make an empty partition of at least 20Gb and assign that as your primary scratch disk.
Don’t save anything else on it.
512Mb isn’t enough to work on images of several Gb.
Look here for more info http://tinyurl.com/fn4jm

H.
T
Tacit
Aug 21, 2006
In article ,
"Chris Brooks" wrote:

I’m wondering if I
should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one (I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and layers on large images).

You heard wrong. An accelerated 3D graphics card does not offer any benefit to Photoshop, which is a 2D program. You are better off spending that money on more system RAM, a faster hard drive, or both.


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N
noone
Aug 21, 2006
In article <vZcGg.32920$
com says…
"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one (I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Put as much RAM into your computer as your motherboard supports. Memory is cheap nowadays and Photoshop (CS2) eats RAM for breakfast. If you have a second Harddrive, make an empty partition of at least 20Gb and assign that as your primary scratch disk.
Don’t save anything else on it.
512Mb isn’t enough to work on images of several Gb.
Look here for more info http://tinyurl.com/fn4jm

H.

HTech,

I believe that the OP was referring to the on-board Vid-RAM (512MB), rather than System RAM – but I could be very wrong.

To the OP, I’ve used a Matrox G-450 64MB card just fine with up through CS on multi-GB images. I’ve now got nVidia Quadro FX4500-512MB and it really is not noticeably faster, than the old Matrox in PS. However, I got it for video work too. Adobe has upped the suggested Vid-RAM requirement to 128MB at around the CS release. I still use the old Matrox with no ill effects in either CS or CS
2.

If you are also doing video, or 3-D, then you will benefit from SLI, but for PS, I doubt that you could measure the improvement, much less notice it.

Hunt
R
ronviers
Aug 21, 2006
Chris Brooks wrote:
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one (I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Hi Chris,
You need to better describe you system configuration for anything intelligible can be said about it but most likely it is 32bit XP Pro with 4GB of memory – if so you have maxed out and are better off waiting for Vista before making major decisions.

Good luck,
Ron
CB
Chris Brooks
Aug 22, 2006
Just to clarify, the box I am putting together will be (likely) a 64 bit core duo machine with 4 gigs of ram (hopefully 2x2gb so there is room for expansion). The hds will likely be raided seagate 7200.10’s – I would love raptors but the price is a bit steep.

A bit unfortunate if photoshop doesn’t make use of the onboard memory on vid cards well – this memory is much faster access than system ram, and I imagine the gpu could easily do many of the alpha channel/image transformations much faster than a cpu – thus intensifying the importance of the on board memory. Hopefully this will be addressed in future releases as an sli setup is easy to get (say, $300 for both cards, making a gig on card ram and two gpus). Would be nice to accent the system ram.

On a side note, can photoshop cs2 handle > 4 gigs of ram (in particular interested in vista 64 bit setups)?

Chris

"Hunt" wrote in message
In article <vZcGg.32920$>,

com says…
"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has
overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I
should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one
(I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Put as much RAM into your computer as your motherboard supports. Memory is cheap nowadays and Photoshop (CS2) eats RAM for breakfast. If you have a second Harddrive, make an empty partition of at least 20Gb and
assign that as your primary scratch disk.
Don’t save anything else on it.
512Mb isn’t enough to work on images of several Gb.
Look here for more info http://tinyurl.com/fn4jm

H.

HTech,

I believe that the OP was referring to the on-board Vid-RAM (512MB), rather
than System RAM – but I could be very wrong.

To the OP, I’ve used a Matrox G-450 64MB card just fine with up through CS on
multi-GB images. I’ve now got nVidia Quadro FX4500-512MB and it really is not
noticeably faster, than the old Matrox in PS. However, I got it for video work
too. Adobe has upped the suggested Vid-RAM requirement to 128MB at around the
CS release. I still use the old Matrox with no ill effects in either CS or CS
2.

If you are also doing video, or 3-D, then you will benefit from SLI, but for
PS, I doubt that you could measure the improvement, much less notice it.
Hunt
H
HTech
Aug 22, 2006
Sorry, I misunderstood. But now you got me dreaming!
H.

"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Just to clarify, the box I am putting together will be (likely) a 64 bit core duo machine with 4 gigs of ram (hopefully 2x2gb so there is room for expansion). The hds will likely be raided seagate 7200.10’s – I would love raptors but the price is a bit steep.

A bit unfortunate if photoshop doesn’t make use of the onboard memory on vid cards well – this memory is much faster access than system ram, and I imagine the gpu could easily do many of the alpha channel/image transformations much faster than a cpu – thus intensifying the importance of the on board memory. Hopefully this will be addressed in future releases as an sli setup is easy to get (say, $300 for both cards, making a gig on card ram and two gpus). Would be nice to accent the system ram.
On a side note, can photoshop cs2 handle > 4 gigs of ram (in particular interested in vista 64 bit setups)?

Chris

"Hunt" wrote in message
In article <vZcGg.32920$>,

com says…
"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has
overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I
should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one
(I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and
layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Put as much RAM into your computer as your motherboard supports. Memory is cheap nowadays and Photoshop (CS2) eats RAM for breakfast. If you have a second Harddrive, make an empty partition of at least 20Gb and
assign that as your primary scratch disk.
Don’t save anything else on it.
512Mb isn’t enough to work on images of several Gb.
Look here for more info http://tinyurl.com/fn4jm

H.

HTech,

I believe that the OP was referring to the on-board Vid-RAM (512MB), rather
than System RAM – but I could be very wrong.

To the OP, I’ve used a Matrox G-450 64MB card just fine with up through CS on
multi-GB images. I’ve now got nVidia Quadro FX4500-512MB and it really is not
noticeably faster, than the old Matrox in PS. However, I got it for video work
too. Adobe has upped the suggested Vid-RAM requirement to 128MB at around the
CS release. I still use the old Matrox with no ill effects in either CS or CS
2.

If you are also doing video, or 3-D, then you will benefit from SLI, but for
PS, I doubt that you could measure the improvement, much less notice it.
Hunt

DF
Derek Fountain
Aug 22, 2006
A bit unfortunate if photoshop doesn’t make use of the onboard memory on vid cards well – this memory is much faster access than system ram, and I imagine the gpu could easily do many of the alpha channel/image transformations much faster than a cpu – thus intensifying the importance of the on board memory. Hopefully this will be addressed in future releases as an sli setup is easy to get (say, $300 for both cards, making a gig on card ram and two gpus). Would be nice to accent the system ram.

Graphics cards are good at 3D rendering. "Take this surface, with this colour and texture, with these reflective characteristics, then hit it with a light source of this colour, from this angle, with this intensity, and render the result. Now do it lots of times in parallel each second to build a picture." That is not a process that Photoshop finds particularly useful.

It has been demonstrated that the GPU on modern graphics cards can be used to run some math-intensive (particularly matrices and vector analysis) processes since they have primitives implemented in massively parallel hardware. Then again, by the time you’ve shited your huge image into GPU-accessible memory, done the work, then shifted it back again, it will often have been quicker to do it with the conventional processor. Plus you’ve got the issue of trying to work out what hardware is in the machine, whether it has the facilities a particular job requires, and whether it will be quicker than the normal CPU anyway.

Although it might be theoretically possible to use GPU hardware, in practise it’s not quite as easy or useful as it looks.
N
noone
Aug 22, 2006
In article ,
usask.ca says…
Just to clarify, the box I am putting together will be (likely) a 64 bit core duo machine with 4 gigs of ram (hopefully 2x2gb so there is room for expansion). The hds will likely be raided seagate 7200.10’s – I would love raptors but the price is a bit steep.

A bit unfortunate if photoshop doesn’t make use of the onboard memory on vid cards well – this memory is much faster access than system ram, and I imagine the gpu could easily do many of the alpha channel/image transformations much faster than a cpu – thus intensifying the importance of the on board memory. Hopefully this will be addressed in future releases as an sli setup is easy to get (say, $300 for both cards, making a gig on card ram and two gpus). Would be nice to accent the system ram.
On a side note, can photoshop cs2 handle > 4 gigs of ram (in particular interested in vista 64 bit setups)?

Chris

I’ve got a 32 bit setup with dual-core Intels and 4GB, running PS CS2 just fine. I have not bothered doing any benchmarks, as to % of memory used, etc. but am very pleased with it.

As to the utilization of GPU power by PS, there really isn’t much need for it. Even games of last decade were more graphics intensive, than PS. Now, as it grows, release, after release, things might well change. PS is being incorporated more and more into work in video, especially After Effects. As this evolution happens, we might well see aspects for 3-D built into PS, but until then, I doubt that the programers are bothering much with GPU usage.

But, it cannot hurt PS to have this vid-RAM capability on the machine, so if you use it elsewhere, you will not take any type of "hit." You just will not utilize all of that power in PS.

Hunt
K
KatWoman
Aug 22, 2006
"Chris Brooks" wrote in message
Just to clarify, the box I am putting together will be (likely) a 64 bit core duo machine with 4 gigs of ram (hopefully 2x2gb so there is room for expansion). The hds will likely be raided seagate 7200.10’s – I would love raptors but the price is a bit steep.

A bit unfortunate if photoshop doesn’t make use of the onboard memory on vid cards well – this memory is much faster access than system ram, and I imagine the gpu could easily do many of the alpha channel/image transformations much faster than a cpu – thus intensifying the importance of the on board memory. Hopefully this will be addressed in future releases as an sli setup is easy to get (say, $300 for both cards, making a gig on card ram and two gpus). Would be nice to accent the system ram.
On a side note, can photoshop cs2 handle > 4 gigs of ram (in particular interested in vista 64 bit setups)?

Chris

"Hunt" wrote in message
In article <vZcGg.32920$>,

com says…
"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has
overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I
should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one
(I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and
layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Put as much RAM into your computer as your motherboard supports. Memory is cheap nowadays and Photoshop (CS2) eats RAM for breakfast. If you have a second Harddrive, make an empty partition of at least 20Gb and
assign that as your primary scratch disk.
Don’t save anything else on it.
512Mb isn’t enough to work on images of several Gb.
Look here for more info http://tinyurl.com/fn4jm

H.

HTech,

I believe that the OP was referring to the on-board Vid-RAM (512MB), rather
than System RAM – but I could be very wrong.

To the OP, I’ve used a Matrox G-450 64MB card just fine with up through CS on
multi-GB images. I’ve now got nVidia Quadro FX4500-512MB and it really is not
noticeably faster, than the old Matrox in PS. However, I got it for video work
too. Adobe has upped the suggested Vid-RAM requirement to 128MB at around the
CS release. I still use the old Matrox with no ill effects in either CS or CS
2.

If you are also doing video, or 3-D, then you will benefit from SLI, but for
PS, I doubt that you could measure the improvement, much less notice it.
Hunt

Please report back about your experiences in PS using 64 and Vista we are curious….
P
PJB
Sep 8, 2006
If your running Win XP x32 then it will only address 2Gb ram. Photoshop cannot over ride that. But you can put a mod to your boot.ini file to increase that to 3Gb Ram.

But yes go for nVidia PCI-Express cards. But make sure you can get 64 bit drivers for it as thats the future at present.

If you go to a 64 bit processor and run Win XP x64 then you can use all the memory. But Photoshop may only use up to 4Gb. It really isn’t compiled for 64 bit yet.
I use iot on my 2 x Dual Core Opteron with 16Gb ram and 2 x Sta 250Gb HDD’s and it flies. Handles 1.5Gb files doing raster updates in 1.5 minutes compared to 30 minutes on a P4 with 2GB Ram.

Hope that helps.
"KatWoman" wrote in message
"Chris Brooks" wrote in message
Just to clarify, the box I am putting together will be (likely) a 64 bit core duo machine with 4 gigs of ram (hopefully 2x2gb so there is room for expansion). The hds will likely be raided seagate 7200.10’s – I would love raptors but the price is a bit steep.

A bit unfortunate if photoshop doesn’t make use of the onboard memory on vid cards well – this memory is much faster access than system ram, and I imagine the gpu could easily do many of the alpha channel/image transformations much faster than a cpu – thus intensifying the importance of the on board memory. Hopefully this will be addressed in future releases as an sli setup is easy to get (say, $300 for both cards, making a gig on card ram and two gpus). Would be nice to accent the system ram.
On a side note, can photoshop cs2 handle > 4 gigs of ram (in particular interested in vista 64 bit setups)?

Chris

"Hunt" wrote in message
In article <vZcGg.32920$>,

com says…
"Chris Brooks" schreef in bericht
Anyone out there with an SLI rig that can let me know if they think it has
overly helped their photoshop use? I’m working with large (several gigabyte) images and am looking a buying a new setup. I’m wondering if I
should bother getting two cheaper 512 meg cards or just stay with the one
(I’ve heard that high mem on the vid card helps with transformations and
layers on large images).

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris

Put as much RAM into your computer as your motherboard supports. Memory is cheap nowadays and Photoshop (CS2) eats RAM for breakfast. If you have a second Harddrive, make an empty partition of at least 20Gb and
assign that as your primary scratch disk.
Don’t save anything else on it.
512Mb isn’t enough to work on images of several Gb.
Look here for more info http://tinyurl.com/fn4jm

H.

HTech,

I believe that the OP was referring to the on-board Vid-RAM (512MB), rather
than System RAM – but I could be very wrong.

To the OP, I’ve used a Matrox G-450 64MB card just fine with up through CS on
multi-GB images. I’ve now got nVidia Quadro FX4500-512MB and it really is not
noticeably faster, than the old Matrox in PS. However, I got it for video work
too. Adobe has upped the suggested Vid-RAM requirement to 128MB at around the
CS release. I still use the old Matrox with no ill effects in either CS or CS
2.

If you are also doing video, or 3-D, then you will benefit from SLI, but for
PS, I doubt that you could measure the improvement, much less notice it.
Hunt

Please report back about your experiences in PS using 64 and Vista we are curious….

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