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Hardware update for optimized photoshop use

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Jul 23, 2015
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Motherboard
x99-UD4
CPU
5820K
Graphics
RX580 8GB
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Hey everyone,

Hope I am on the right forum. I am running a quite stable system at the moment. High Sierra 10.13.2 on the following:

Gigabyte X99-UD4
32GB Ram
500GB SSD
R9-280x

I work a lot with photoshop and when retouching important images the files tend to get big. I usually bring into Photoshop files that are around 150MB in 16-bit mode and with various layers, they easily become 2GB in size. The system handles them without a problem but when I use the brush once the files are around 2GB then strokes become laggy.

I know that converting the files into 8-bit would solve the issue but it's quite critical for me to work in 16-bit.

My question is can anyone recommend certain hardware upgrade that might tackle this issue?

Would a better GPU help? If so I was thinking maybe the RX 580 8GB?
Add more Ram, maybe 64GB in total?
M.2 drive?
Better CPU?
All of the above or a mixture?

Any advice would be greatly appreciate it, thanks in advance!
 
I'll try to provide some input.

If you can, I'd suggest running some monitoring tools and try to see if you are hitting any bottlenecks while you work. Run activity monitor, Intel power gadget or similar, and see if you are hitting any obvious bottlenecks.

With 32 GB of Ram, I'd be surprised if you were running out there, unless you have some serious stuff running in the background. With an SSD and that amount of RAM, I'd also guess that disk throughput isn't your issue.

If you are being CPU limited, that should be pretty easy to figure out. If I were going to guess, I'd say GPU might be your issue. One thing you could probably do is work with the 3D settings in photoshop, and see if lessening your use of the GPU impacts your experience in either direction (positive or negative). It might help hone in on your bottleneck, or it might help you work around the issue by shifting load from your GPU to your CPU.
 
I'll try to provide some input.

If you can, I'd suggest running some monitoring tools and try to see if you are hitting any bottlenecks while you work. Run activity monitor, Intel power gadget or similar, and see if you are hitting any obvious bottlenecks.

With 32 GB of Ram, I'd be surprised if you were running out there, unless you have some serious stuff running in the background. With an SSD and that amount of RAM, I'd also guess that disk throughput isn't your issue.

If you are being CPU limited, that should be pretty easy to figure out. If I were going to guess, I'd say GPU might be your issue. One thing you could probably do is work with the 3D settings in photoshop, and see if lessening your use of the GPU impacts your experience in either direction (positive or negative). It might help hone in on your bottleneck, or it might help you work around the issue by shifting load from your GPU to your CPU.


Hey thanks for the reply.

What do you mean by the 3D Settings?
 
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