How important is a graphics card for graphic design?

[Mynameismang]

How important is a graphics card for graphic design, and how good a GPU needs to be to run this kind of applications?

 

[bignastyid]

Depends on the program being used. What do the software designers recommend?

 

[martinch]

The answer is "it depends". In theory, graphic design software could be CPU-bound, but some software (some of the Adobe programs, e.g. Photoshop) can offload some of the computation work onto the GPU instead of the CPU (oddly, GPUs are good at doing graphics stuff quickly...). Also, some software will support 10-bit-per-channel colour (along with the requisite 10-bit monitor), which requires a GPU that supports it (nVidia Quadro, AMD FirePro or Matrox).