Is a Video Card needed for Photoshop?

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u4ic_fln

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Im building a new computer for my mom. She doesnt play games on it. All she does is browse the internet, email, and play with photoshop. My question is, as stated in the subject line, does she need a video card in order to run photoshop smoothly, or will the onboard video of a newer motherboard work just fine?
 
Depends on the onboard, though you'd probably do better with a cheap graphics card like the 9400GT or HD3650.
 
If you get an AMD build that has either the 780G or 790GX chipset, that will be more than enough.
 
Not really, unless you're dual-monitoring; I have Photoshop cs4 with an intergrated graphics card, it susually depends on the amont of RAM and mine uses 4 for maximun performance.
 
She is using an old version of photoshop, v7.0 i think. I was thinking of using a MB with the G45 Chipset (with the Intel GMA X4500HD GPU already built in). What say you good sirs?
 
i used Photoshop cs3 on my onboard card in this rig.. witch i bought like 3-4 years ago now and it ran perfectly fine so youl be alright with it. unless your building a new one then you might as well throw in a card it wont do anything but help
 
I am reasonably confident that photoshop is primarily CPU driven not GPU driven. The same goes for most other Adobe products such as Premiere.

The only issue is rendering time of filters. It might take 12 rather than 9 seconds to load a super complex filter. But, still, this is mostly CPU driven not GPU driven, I believe.

I have ran CS4 extended very well rendering effects onto video with my e6750 with onboard video. I have an 8400gs now for the dual monitor support but have not had to use photoshop since installing it, as I no longer do audio/video work, so I can't compare. I can only say that any modern build WILL run photoshop quite well. Anything dual core is going to be totally fine.
 
CS4 is supposed to be more GPU driven than CPU driven; CS3 and before are CPU driven though if I remember right.
 
Yeah i ran Photoshop on my Pentium 4 rig for a while, just make sure you get 4GB ram, an okayish onboard and a decent CPU.

EDIT: Just saw Carnage's post, which makes me think, i DID test with CS3 so maybe it has changed.
 
CS4 is supposed to be more GPU driven than CPU driven; CS3 and before are CPU driven though if I remember right.

CS4 also deals with video effect rendering which is conventionally GPU based, whereas CS3 lacked that capability and only dealt with still images and still image series animations, which are traditionally CPU driven.

I think it likely will affect the render time, but I can't possibly imagine it being too extreme.

Now, if you are working with massive files then the time might be signifigant enough for any difference to matter. I've rendered images that were thousands of pixels by thousands of pixels and it did take several minutes to render the more complex effects, but I doubt most people are doing that.
 
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