How important is the graphics card for photo editing etc? My wife a quite good PC, but a pretty old (4.5 years) mid range graphics card. She does a lot of photography and then photo shop and HDR. Will upgrading the graphics card make any difference?

What version of Photoshop? 64 bit may offer better flexibility and the opportunity to have more RAM which is always the biggest bottleneck.
Win 7, 64 bit plus 64 bit Photoshop here, 8 GB RAM, 2 GB graphics card.

All Win 7 64, with an i7 processor and 8GB RAM, just a crappy graphics card. So will upgrading the graphics help as I would think (happy to be proved wrong) that most of the photoshop work is processor/RAM, not graphics card.

i would say not massively. i have open GL enabled on my mac as the card allows it but that just adds flick panning (where the image flicks across and slows down) and the hand tool gets a rotate which is handy for brushing horizontally when your hand movements with a wacom pen naturally work better at an angle.

card is a lowly intelHD4000 with 512mb of shared memory but what really makes a difference to performance is 16gb ram and an ssd scratch disk.

if you are on a budget i would spend the money on ram.

I was thinking of an SSD for the boot drive as that would probably make the biggest difference to using the PC.

Agree with MrSmith, I’d spend the money on more RAM. Photoshop loves RAM. It’s not a 3D graphics card, so won’t necessarily use tons of GFX memory.

there’s a few 3d painting features “grayed out” if your graphics card doesn’t have enough memory but these are superfluous to photoshops main usage.

I agree. Graphics card doesn’t make a lot of difference.

Only reason to pay big is if you have really specific and unusual requirements (like more than 2 monitors, more than 2560×1600 resolution, etc).

RAM and a fast scratch disk (like a fast smallish SSD drive) will make more of a difference.

(over 3GB ram doesn’t make a difference unless you’ve got 64-bit windows)

don’t know about pc’s but there used to be a 4gb ram limit so you will probably need the latest 64bit os and CS6 to address more Ram. photoshop will use this before a scratch disk. a separate scratch disk is essential IMHO as this keeps the spinning beachball of death away.
i do work on big files though 2-4gb in size. for smaller files you may get away without one if you have lots of usable ram (16-32gb)

Buy more RAM, and also a small SSD (30GB or so) to use as a ‘scratch disk’ within PS.

With Photoshop CS5/CS6, you can now use CUDA cores for processing, rather than CPU (Photoshop & Premiere).

You’ll need a card with 1Gb memory as a minimum and with CUDA cores. Once you have that, you just need to search for the CUDA HACK

How big a file size will Photoshop be dealing with? 40 megapixel images from top of the range cameras?
Printing onto A0 or bigger?
Displaying on a large format retina style display?
It is nice to have all this technology but I sometimes wonder if output devices can deal with all this magic trickery.
11 gears anyone? 🙂

40mpixel? It’s 80now and always work in 16bit so Files are 480mb with just one layer. 😯

Just to clarify, when they talk about RAM up there they mean your machine’s RAM not the graphics card RAM.

Yes. It’s this ram that photoshop will use before it resorts to a scratch disk.
If you have a small amount of ram and no scratch disk things will get glacial.

the latest creative suite is shifting more and more workload over to the graphics card, so a decent graphics card can make a difference.

I had ( still have it in a box ) a nVidia GTX 260 card with 768Mb ( 768 is the min, but 1Gb recommended min ) of ram. With the CUDA hack, I got the benefits of the accelerated options in photoshop and after effects. All that being said, off loading to the graphics card does not benefit ALL aspects of the workload … there was a good article i read from adobe which explained that sometimes keeping work on the CPU was faster than offloading to the GPU.

I’ve since upgraded to a GTX 670 card. For my needs, photoshop, after effects and premiere, it handles files without hassle.

I agree with the other comments too, max out the RAM and let adobe use the bulk of it, get the system 64bit and use a seperate scratch disk. It just makes things move along quicker.