OpenCL vs OpenGL

Hello all and thank you to anyone who has read this,

I've been fantasy-building for a while and it all seems pretty approachable. I'm building a hackintosh for my graphic designer fiance' and I want it to be a monster, especially at Photoshop.

What I gather is that Photoshop supports OpenCL more than OpenGL and that if that's my goal, an AMD graphics card would be my best bet. However I've seen that getting AMD cards to work and be reliable is less straight forward than going Nvidia.

So my question is; Would photoshop performance be better buying a good nvidia card or a more modest but supported AMD card?
Thanks for reading,
Mechno

You don't need an especially powerful GPU for Photoshop, it won't be fully utilized anyway. Just get a well supported GPU.

Photoshop will be happy when you have lots of RAM, that's it.

Mechno said:

Hello all and thank you to anyone who has read this,

I've been fantasy-building for a while and it all seems pretty approachable. I'm building a hackintosh for my graphic designer fiance' and I want it to be a monster, especially at Photoshop.

What I gather is that Photoshop supports OpenCL more than OpenGL and that if that's my goal, an AMD graphics card would be my best bet. However I've seen that getting AMD cards to work and be reliable is less straight forward than going Nvidia.

So my question is; Would photoshop performance be better buying a good nvidia card or a more modest but supported AMD card?
Thanks for reading,
Mechno

Click to expand...

Mechno, you have it a bit mixed up. OpenGL and OpenCL are not the correct equivalencies. DirectX competes with OpenGL for 3D rendering and CUDA competes with OpenCL for passing computational work to the GPU.

In reference to Photoshop, it's actually a CUDA-friendly application, not OpenCL. So if you want the best performance out of Photoshop and the rest of the Adobe suite you want an nVidia GPU. If you want the best out of FCPX, Motion and other Apple software then you want a strong OpenCL card which definitely includes all the AMD cards and some nVidia cards. I think the 970 supports OpenCL, the 960 definitely does not. I installed a used GTX 670 into my old MacPro and it's a wonderful bargain that supports OpenCL and CUDA.

The Mercury Graphics Engine (used by Photoshop) is actually build on top of OpenCL and OpenGL, not CUDA. Adobe is using CUDA only for their video applications utilizing the Mercury Playback Engine.

But as I said, the performance doesn't scale very well with the GPGPU compute power. No need to spend a fortune on a TitanX.