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graphics card for CS5


M

meamjw

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I use CS5 on a Win 7 Pro 64 bit machine that has built in GPU and graphics is the slowest item on my performance scores. The scores don't excite me much, but fairly often when I'm doing photo editing there is a very noticeable lag in graphics keeping up with my brushes, so I have been thinking of adding a graphics card. I'm not sure how much card performance I need. Most of the information I find on the web is directed to gamers. I have zero interest in computer games and I am poor, so I don't want to spend more than necessary to get a card that will easily keep up with editing activities. Anyone have any good recommendation?
 
When I was using CS5 back in the good ol days, I was on a crappy Ati Radeon HD4550, 512mb VRAM... I say crappy, it only just broke down a couple of months ago after at least 4 years of good use.

My personal recommendation, on a budget, for photoshop is the AMD r7 240
it's a decent budget price at around £50
if you wanted something EVEN CHEAPER, you could probably pick up older low end cards for about £20 or so. so long as it's an AMD/Nvidia certified manufacturer (Sapphire, Zotac, ASUS, Gigabyte etc) and has more than 1GB of VRAM on board, you'll be okay I think.
 
Before I would spend on a graphics card, I would confirm that is the cause of your problem. For example I could easily see it being a memory problem, or the CPU is simply falling behind, or even the proper allocation of memory between Photoshop, the operating system, and other applications. One easy way to find this out is to open task manager while you have Photoshop running and all the other applications that you normally use, and determine the fraction of your resources being used by various processes. If these all look good, then we can talk about graphics issues.

Tom M
 
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