Graphics for Digital Photography

[ssalem47]

How much graphics power does a digital photographer need for running Adobe Photoshop and Adobe LightRoom? Would onboard HD4200 be enough, or should one go to a separate graphics card?

 

[TheViper]

That should do just fine.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Yep you're fine, it's really about accuracy more than power, and nowadays they're all pretty good.

Only if you want a higher bit depth would I switch cards to full DP support, and even then you need a monitor that supports it.

For now go with what you've got it's more than fine, and then research if you'd even care about higher bitdepth.

 

[ssalem47]

Thanks - I'm trying to figure out what my grown son the digital photographer should get to replace his single-core Pentium 4 with 2 GB RAM running Win XP. For a wedding, he typically processes about 2000 images through LightRoom and PhotoShop, with the images residing on external USB-connected hard drives. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is for this kind of work. My guess is that he should have a reasonable-speed quad-core processor (preferably 45nm process) with 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB+ hard drive. Separately I am getting him a 1 TB external drive with e-SATA capability.

 

[TheViper]

A son couldn't ask for a better father.