RX 550 or GT 1030 For Photoshop

[ZombieLover97]

Hey everyone!

A friend of mine uses Photoshop , illustrator etc for work
I want to give him a gift and I can't decide between

Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 2GB (80 EUR)
and
Gigabyte Radeon RX 550 2GB Gaming OC(100 EUR)

He doesn't know how to overclock and he wants a GPU basically for work not so much for games
(The GPU that he uses now is GeForce 9600 GT Asus Magic HDMI 512MB Edition
and he uses a CORE 2 QUAD Q6600 not overclocked CPU)

Basically I want to give him as a gift a better GPU than the 9600 GT but for Photoshop and editing not so much for games

He is a professional photographer

 

[LilDog1291]

A GT 1030 will be better than what he has for sure if he can't spring for one of the Nvidia workstation cards from the Quadro line (which are crazy expensive).

 

[13thmonkey]

Lightroom benefits from CUDA (which Nvidia Supports), however in LR forums you'll see many people saying that it doesn't help them, you look at their specs and they have lower end cards (like the 1030 or slightly better). However given your CPU I think that Cuda will still help.

There are a few tests comparing Cuda with openCL (Amd's option which Nvidia also support) and Cuda wins hands down.

They appear to be close enough in performance aside from that that I'll have to consider that the RX550 is not a massive OpenCL powerhouse, hence I'd have to suggest the 1030.

 

[13thmonkey]

A GT 1030 will be better than what he has for sure if he can't spring for one of the Nvidia workstation cards from the Quadro line (which are crazy expensive).

you don't need quadro.

 

[13thmonkey]

BTW I'm a lightroom user with a higher end GPU (GTX970) and a decent CPU (3570k) and I really notice the difference with GPU acceleration on vs off.

 

[ZombieLover97]

A GT 1030 will be better than what he has for sure if he can't spring for one of the Nvidia workstation cards from the Quadro line (which are crazy expensive).

Are the Quadro GPU so much better than the GT 1030 or RX 550??
Yeah they are indeed expensive!!

 

[13thmonkey]

A GT 1030 will be better than what he has for sure if he can't spring for one of the Nvidia workstation cards from the Quadro line (which are crazy expensive).

Are the Quadro GPU so much better than the GT 1030 or RX 550??
Yeah they are indeed expensive!!

No, for CAD work and 3-d modelling etc. they are useful, but for PS and LR not so much.

 

[ZombieLover97]

So the GT 1030 will be enough?
Because The RX 550 has more Memory Bus, ROPs, TMUs, Shading Units and better Bus Interface
But it's more expensive
Does the rx 550 worth or i should save my money with the gt 1030??

 

[ZombieLover97]

I forgot to mention that he has 2 monitors one with HDMI(widescreen) and other with DVI-D (not wide)

 

[13thmonkey]

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GT-1030-vs-AMD-RX-550/m283726vs3925

They are closeish, it's impossible to compare cores, rops etc. because they are built different and are differently capable, the biggest thing is that PS can use cuda cores much better than it can use the more generic openCL language.

This is old, but not that much has changed: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1894349

Look at the first graph here: once beyond an iGPU there's not much scaling. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-NVIDIA-GeForce-GPU-Performance-899/

 

[ZombieLover97]

ok so gt 1030 it is!!
Thank you
If you have any other suggestion at a similar price tell me!!
I have 2 months to decide GPU