Computer upgrade

[v_kyr]

Well it's always like this, if a dedicated software or specific benchmark suite etc. hasn't been specifically designed to make full use of all possible available CPU cores or takes the full hardware advantages of a modern GPU, then even some older less complex but higher clocked CPU/GPU can probably outperform it.

[R C-R]

Regarding Photoshop's memory management, you do not need to be a programmer or examine its code to notice how many people say it needs tons of RAM to perform most tasks well, how often it hits scratch disks or what happens if you don't follow Adobe's recommendation to defrag them often or use a fast port to connect them, leave other apps running in the background, & so on.

[SrPx]

Actually, I had read a very long test certain lab had made, to determine if PS indeed used many cores. Their conclusions were that 2 cores at most, and the best performance you could get was going for the higher clock, and a modern cpu.

 

In an adobe thread, of those of like 14 pages, where i read how some professionals (in every sense. I consider myself one, but some of those really knew a lot of the internals) , not as old as 2013,  although there were lots of opinions and experiences shared there, the clear conclusion, most convincing -and supported- points were that indeed, with PS makes even more sense having more RAM than a SSD, even while the latter is very good to have (if you are ok with those disks, specially as scratch disk! :s ). So, no surprises here, with tons of milestones flying around my head,  bosses crazy pressure and all, I did know too well, with a very long list of PS versions how ram and a high clock processor does benefit PS performance, since always.  Whenever I asked for a hardware update in my seat, always that it was RAM or CPU, my productivity would get the highest boost.

Someone stated in that thread that it'd be indeed best to make a RAM disk -if anyone remembers about that-  than having a SSD as a scratch disk (also due to the number of writes, is a crazy usage for a SSD, but some people don't care about having to replace it soon), but a bunch of people mentioned -with solid reasons/proofs- that this would indeed be worse, that is best to just have a good lot of RAM, let PS handle it (instead of blocking some memory to configure a RAM disk), more optimal than the other way. But a lot of people that I'd respect fully from their CVs and obvious tons of experience were agreeing there: PS key thing is RAM and CPU speed, not multi core. Sorry, I don't have these threads handy. I tend not to stick to conclusions read in a forum thread, but to me those were certainly solid, from quite experienced people (not the average pro). So, yep, you can then take this as an opinion only, as I don't have the links around...

 

I am not sure there is a definitive answer anywhere in that linked discussion regarding how many core are used for what (or when).

 

Regarding "fine tuning," PS's in-app memory management is archaic. That is why Adobe must impose file (pixel) size limitations, why the app requires so much scratch space for some processes, why it has those stupid "purge" functions, why they have to tell you to "use layers wisely," & all the other stuff you have to fiddle with to optimize its performance.

 

The need for some of this dates back to the 1990's, when OS level memory management was crude & users really did have to constantly tweak a lot of things to keep the much less powerful systems of that era from slowing to a crawl, or far too frequently crash badly enough to require a restart.

 

Some users have become so accustomed to that over the years that they believe it is still necessary or somehow desirable. It is neither.

 

To be fair: PS, in every company and version, has always worked great for me. You could argue that I and others might be just too used to know where are the potential bottle necks, and that knowing how to avoid them even in crappy old machines does not make them good in performance. But hey, I believe we're entering a bit in the field of synthetic benchmarks, and too strict considerations,  while it is real life cases, real scenarios what matters. Despite usually my typical boss having me working with some turtle machine, PS allowed always to do even crazily complex work. It produces no trembling while you draw for improving performance, has a great aliasing, allows to paint and work perfectly for virtually anything.  (even so, have their strong critics from comic artists and the like, who much prefer the brush performance and stabilization options given by Clip Paint Studio and SAI. And in that department, I believe they are absolutely right, even in the recent versions. But the overall solution that PS is extremely hard to beat. )

 

So, I'd clarify just that from what I have read in several places, I'd be very inclined to believe as true that theory/tests that say that PS does not use really many cores except in the case of some filters, not so much the main tools.

 

But IMO, this is very far from being important if the result is -which it is-  is that PS is a royal wonder in good hands. (And so is/will be AP. When I have in my hands something not with this potential, the situation is immediately noticed)

 

Articles like that have been around since at least when Windows first graduated from being little more than DOS with a GUI slapped on it. There will always be cheaper PC's, complete with the latest "bullet point" specs that look so impressive on spec sheets, yet somehow Macs continue to make "best of" & "editor's choice" lists throughout the industry.

 

 

Also because there's a strong user base since eons of pros using Macs.I tell you I have done from 3D for commercial games for a large phone distributor, working 14 hours a day, using a very old Sempron (~ celeron in performance), and before that, around 2001, with an AMD athlon I got assigned, I do all sort of press work digital painting, 2D/3D work, etc. Not a single hardware failure or system going down in all that time (true that all there, we knew how to handle well Windows, install it well, etc). Of course, Windows people are not strangers to crashes, but in my experience, is more some poorly internal in even some of the high end packages (this what people complains so much in Affinity, was many times worse in PS and Max some years ago) 

 

I have done video editing, audio editing, 3D high detail (millions of polygons), illustrated large canvases (digital painting, very realistic) which is most of my activity now, rendering, mountains of corporate image work, design for print, but also for web, etc. And of course, tons of web designing and programming.  All that with Windows PC machines. And indeed, VERY low end machines (semprons, celerons, core 2 duos, athlons.. the highest I ever could use in a company was an i5 ! Sad as it sounds). In small/mid size companies often the budget is low. And yeah, the bang for the buck, I can tell it keeps beating Macs, even today.  A mac is a master piece of what hardware must be, I agree. But I prefer any day to configure my stuff as needed, even pick my own hardware pieces, and use my workarounds and pay half of the money every 5 years (not to fair to say so, as my machine is from 2008 and still kicking well). I can't deny Macs are very carefully made and crafted, but to me, a piece of hardware that "allows" me to do the work, and be productive, at a much nicer price (even if it were just a 20% cheaper !...but the more complex your setup, the higher the difference) , that's a winner for me. I have used Macs, and like them, a lot. But this theory of them being better, is incredibly subjective, specially with today's modern PC hardware. And there's more software variety, globally. And despite this, said it before, if I were swimming in gold I'd love to have 3 machines each with each of the main OSes. As there are advantages in the 3,  and I like the (almost) error-free factor in macs.

 

Oh, oh, i have 6 cores, that would be me, what did I win ? B)

 

Strictly in my case, compared to other similar apps, AP/AD do seem to like to max all my cores. I can easily get 99% percent CPU usage with simple tasks; the only apps that manage to approach the same CPU utilization percentage are video encoders and CPU stress test apps.

 

With other similarish software it's rare to see more than 35-40% CPU usage, and in that scenario a faster core will provide more performance, one of the reasons why Intel's do good in PS.

 

Less cores = higher Mhz vs more cores = lower Mhz per core. Blame it on size, power and temperature targets :P

 

If you have a 4core CPU with 5ghz and a 16 core with 2,5ghz, and a software that only uses 2 cores; its not rocket science to determine which one will have an advantage in that app. The situation will change 180 degrees if the application does know how to use 16 cores; that does not make one or the other a bad CPU just unsuited for that specific scenario.

 

 

Yep.

 

About the CPU usage (in Windows)... I have experienced that lowering the task's cpu priority (in task manager) a bit, in some cases, doesn't necessarily  slow down an app when it is killing the whole performance (of the OS & app) if left untouched, it can end up finally working well ! . I believe this is because some modern applications can hog totally old machines' operative system and resources, but when you force it to give some fresh air to the cpu, it works like charm (in my experience, and only tested this in my i7, but was totally helpful/critical )

 

The only thing I'd agree about people thinking Windows can't be used to work seriously...(none here has said so, but I have read and heard this from Mac users, often) ... is that there is a specific Windows version with which I'd be more inclined to agree in this : Windows Vista.  

 

If the app you use for your work functions seamlessly even in low end machines, and allows to get the job done, I'd say a cheap machine is a winner, even more for companies needing to have a lot of seats. (or small ones that simply have very low budget) And the compatibility thing is important in fast environments. If a PC would be something you could buy and be up todate with the expected work to be done, over decades, then yep, I'd say, buy the best, like the old sewing machines (my family has one from the first years in the XXth century, works great). But is not the case, we are constantly upgrading, graphic production is always increasing its specs.

[v_kyr]

Regarding Photoshop's memory management, you do not need to be a programmer or examine its code to notice how many people say it needs tons of RAM to perform most tasks well, how often it hits scratch disks or what happens if you don't follow Adobe's recommendation to defrag them often or use a fast port to connect them, leave other apps running in the background, & so on.

 

Then I wonder why ALL these people still use it and do relay on it, if it's mem management is soo bad and it leaves their harddisks in such desolate critical states etc.

[R C-R]

Then I wonder why ALL these people still use it and do relay on it, if it's mem management is soo bad and it leaves their harddisks in such desolate critical states etc.

They use it because it is powerful & mature. Regarding the disks comment, please note that I was talking about scratch disks, which Adobe says need to be defragmented regularly for best performance. It has nothing to do with "desolate critical states," whatever that is supposed to mean.

[v_kyr]

They use it because it is powerful & mature. Regarding the disks comment, please note that I was talking about scratch disks, which Adobe says need to be defragmented regularly for best performance. It has nothing to do with "desolate critical states," whatever that is supposed to mean.

 

Desolate critical states means here, if your harddisk has very huge fragmentation all over the disk and if big space consuming applications or files segment blocks are thus scattered crosswise all over a partition in unconnected blocks. Which is then critical if a heavily used media surface over time will get accumulated physical defect segments on it's surface (which is bad if it happens exactly to the boot block sectors).

 

However, a scratch disk in PS parlance is nothing else as the swapping disk medium, which is used when there isn't enough RAM and thus things have to be swapped out on disk. I assume that PS pros (power users, those who live in PS) probably do setup or use here some extra disk partition for these tasks then. And if free block areas are connected one behind the other, things can be written and read faster (swapped) since the hd heads don't have to move that much forth and back over the surface. 

 

All in all It's the same as if you would make exhaustive memory consuming things in AD/AP and things would have to use the harddisk as swap medium then, since there isn't enough free RAM available.

[R C-R]

From Adobe's Optimize Photoshop CC performance:

The following guidelines can help you assign and manage your scratch disks:

• Scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.
• Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one your operating system uses for virtual memory.
• RAID disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
• Defragment drives with scratch disks regularly.

 

The reason Adobe recommends a different drive is so the heads don't have to keep seeking to different tracks to service I/O operations that have nothing to do with its memory swaps. Defragmentation further reduces the need for head seeks. However, this would not be necessary if:

 

1. PS did not keep so much image data cached in RAM to begin with, and

2. It took advantage of modern page oriented VM memory management techniques like those built into OS X & (I assume) Windows.

 

As you may remember from Affinity Review #1, the Affinity apps were designed from the beginning to use a memory management system capable of high-end photo editing without requiring enormous amounts of RAM. So, unlike PS, it does not require as much RAM to begin with, & even when it has to hit the disk for swaps, it will leave that task to the memory manager in the OS.

 

Getting back to the original topic of this discussion, this is why -- if someone is configuring a system for maximum performance with the Affinity apps -- the CPU is where the money should go. Upgrading RAM is not going to do much.

[v_kyr]

From Adobe's Optimize Photoshop CC performance:

The reason Adobe recommends a different drive is so the heads don't have to keep seeking to different tracks to service I/O operations that have nothing to do with its memory swaps. ...

 

Question: What is the Photoshop Scratch Disk? How Do You Fix "Scratch Disk Full" Errors?

Adobe Answer: The Photoshop scratch disk is your hard drive. Photoshop uses your hard drive as temporary "swap" space, or virtual memory, when your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation. If you only have one hard drive or partition in your computer, then the scratch disk will be the drive where your operating system is installed (the C drive on a Windows system).

 

Adobe's help/advice about how and why to optimize PS performance under certain conditions!

 

 

Getting back to the original topic of this discussion, this is why -- if someone is configuring a system for maximum performance with the Affinity apps -- the CPU is where the money should go. Upgrading RAM is not going to do much.

 

So you really think I get the maximum on performance if I have the fastest available CPU/GPU but just 4 or 8 GB of RAM? - Usually you buy a computer system so it can handle various and all different tasks you commonly want to deal with, be it text processing, graphics art, image processing and manipulation, 3D rendering, video creation/cutting/ripping, music creation/mixing or hard core gaming, programming etc. etc. So you use commonly a bunch of different applications and software, which probably all do differ in the way they use and deal with the system memory. - For all this to have a strong powerful CPU/GPU is desirable, but and that is a big but without also having enough supporting system RAM memory too, all that is then like driving a race car with a tightened handbrake!

 

Maybe I should add, on my old iMac firing up just Xcode turns the system dark, means doing just a few trivial things here with the IDE takes and occupies nearly all the RAM and the system slows down and I can go and setup some new cup of coffee in the meantime until the system returns. The lastest VisualStudio versions do behave nearly similar here on Win boxes. 

[R C-R]

So which part of "Scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing" & "Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one your operating system uses for virtual memory" do you disagree with?

[v_kyr]

I think for those people who make exhausting business related work with it, like some guys from advertising agencies and the prepress domain etc., it would be bad to have all together on one drive. - For safety reasons I would strictly seperate these parts, as I do it with the OS and dev environments etc., I always seperate the OS and most of the applications and my user data as far as possible. Meaning the OS and all OS related things are on their own main startup drive, the apps are on another and data is on another one. This eases to make separate backups and in case of a possible hardware damage you just have to exchange the faulty/defect part here and just need to recover that one. - So for PS it should be of course better setup the way to use a different disk here than the OS!

[SrPx]

I don't know Macs at such depth. But in Windows, in most applications (even Office ones, a great example is MS Excel or Access with huge files) RAM does optimize a lot your every day use (heck, even searching stuff with many tabs). And it has an extremely interesting aspect: Comparing to upgrading significantly your CPU, RAM is quite cheap (for Windows! PCs, (of course, same goes for a PC where you install Linux, obviously) ). Just ensuring is one of the good brands (Crucial, Kingston, Patriot, etc) Cheaper than any other upgrade. And 3D software (specially modern versions), for example, eats tons of RAM for breakfast (with a reason, handling millions of polygons, huge textures, very complex shaders, etc, etc). 

[R C-R]

...  So for PS it should be of course better setup the way to use a different disk here than the OS!

 

I am unclear about what point you are trying to make with this. What I quoted from Adobe's optimize performance page in post #57 refers to scratch disks, which PS uses as its own private VM swap space. In a setup optimized for PS, this is separate from what the OS and all OS related things would use on the startup drive, what apps would use for documents files, & where apps & their supporting files would be stored.

 

I don't think you are suggesting a forth drive for this, but I am not sure what you are suggesting.

[anon1]

could we like stop this at some point?

like I think for anyone interested in a real answer all points are on the table, RAM for apple is way to expensive and for windows it is cheap and 4GB is definitely not enough today.

 

Everything better is better and the more impatient you are the more expensive your hardware needs to be

 

prof. will just buy the best gear anyway/ know their stuff (hence the term professional) and most AP users will fall somewhere in between and buy what fits their bill

 

I think there is no need for a rant about PS/ how many drives one needs.... I mean if you want to continue I'm fine with just not reading it but just don't think it helps anyone

 

cheers  :)

[v_kyr]

I said never ever use the OS drive for this, as far as you have enough drives available here. Let it take another drive, idealy an own little scratch drive, since hdds are cheap nowadays. - In case you have just one drive, then partition it accordingy so that it has at least it's own scratch partition.

[R C-R]

I don't know Macs at such depth. But in Windows, in most applications (even Office ones, a great example is MS Excel or Access with huge files) RAM does optimize a lot your every day use (heck, even searching stuff with many tabs).

It is the same for Macs. I am not disputing that in any way. I am just pointing out that (as I put in italics to emphasize in a previous post to make it as clear as possible) if someone is configuring a system for maximum performance with the Affinity apps, then adding RAM is not going to do much because they have been optimized to use much less RAM than (as a prime example) Photoshop, even with huge files.

 

This is one of the major benefits of Serif's developing an entirely new code base for Affinity. There is no need for dedicated scratch disks or all the tweaks PS requires to optimize its performance.

 

If you are going to run both PS & Affinity, then sure, more RAM will help, but since a lot of users are interested in ditching PS & Adobe's subscription model, this is something that should not be overlooked.

[R C-R]

... RAM for apple is way to expensive and for windows it is cheap and 4GB is definitely not enough today.

Is it OK if I mention that Apple currently sells only one Mac with less than 8 GB installed, the bottom of the line Mac Mini?