[SOLVED] Cheapest card w/ decent relative speed increase from UHD630 (with 16G available ram!) for Photoshop and light gaming?

[erik_h]

I have a nice 4K monitor which I use for Photoshop, though I am not wedded to gaming in 4k.
When i game at all, I don't play anything super heavy; I'm a GOG kind of guy and all of my titles are pretty old thouh at some old.
I'm a low end gamer and I'm currently running on my built-in UHD630 Intel graphics. But RAM is cheap, so I have 32G, which is to say that the built-in chip can access 16G of video ram whenever I need it to! lol

I sometimes think of adding a video card. But I can't tell how fast my system it (though i'm sure it's a lot faster than a 630 which can access less RAM.)

Help!

 

[TerryLaze]

At least tell us your CPU...
In general decide on an amount of money you want to spend and get whatever is close to that. Currently GPUs are heavily overpriced because of the mining craze so I would suggest to wait.

 

[Archaic59]

I have a nice 4K monitor which I use for Photoshop, though I am not wedded to gaming in 4k.
When i game at all, I don't play anything super heavy; I'm a GOG kind of guy and all of my titles are pretty old thouh at some old.
I'm a low end gamer and I'm currently running on my built-in UHD630 Intel graphics. But RAM is cheap, so I have 32G, which is to say that the built-in chip can access 16G of video ram whenever I need it to! lol

I sometimes think of adding a video card. But I can't tell how fast my system it (though i'm sure it's a lot faster than a 630 which can access less RAM.)

Help!

Even a lowly GTX 1050 ti is 4 to 5 times faster than the Intel integrated HD630 graphics. Look for that model or a GTX 1650 Super for huge performance increase over iGPU.

 

[erik_h]

At least tell us your CPU...
In general decide on an amount of money you want to spend and get whatever is close to that. Currently GPUs are heavily overpriced because of the mining craze so I would suggest to wait.

Oops, sorry.

Xeon 2246G--basically like an i7 8700 8th gen, but a teeeeensy but faster and w/ ECC, this being a workstation 6 cores, 3.6GHz nominal, 4.8GHz turbo

 

[Karadjgne]

Anything less than a 1080ti/2070Super/5700xt and you won't realistically enjoy gaming even older games and simpler graphics at 4k.

Requireing that you drop gaming to 1080p, which is fine for a 4k monitor to run as it's a derivative.

Which means anything from a 1050/Rx570 on up is going to give significantly better results, including for such stuff as Photoshop.

The vram is one thing, but the power of the processor is different. A cpu is few cores that work in series-minor parallel, a gpu is thousands of cores that work in massive parallel. That's populating the pixels much faster which results in less time sitting waiting for the picture to pop up fully.

Honestly I'd get the biggest, meanest gpu you can justify the budget for. Including opting for the larger vram versions, I'd chose a 4Gb 1050ti over a 3Gb 1060 since you will be dealing with 4k.