A friend (who doesn't have a SO/SU account) has had a licence of Adobe CS6 for some time. Mostly uses Photoshop and InDesign. He doesn't want to upgrade to Creative Cloud for the reasons such as perpetual payments instead of perpetual licence, backward-incompatible fileformats etc. His computer is a few years old, runs Win7 x64, Core i5, 8 GB RAM, uses separate 240 GB SSD as a scratch disk, displays on 30" monitor in 2560×1440. Working with 100 MB images has been a breeze for him. He does only 2D work as far as I know.
Currently, he works with multiple maps and some other huge input images that are each around 1 GB in size, and he reports that suddenly the performance impact when doing any work has become very large.
OK, I get that 10× larger images will be (at the very least) 10× more taxing on the system. The obvious solution is hardware upgrade and we want to go that way. Now, which components should be upgraded?
- CPU - yes, a modern i5/i7 would definitely help
- RAM - yes, a larger RAM such as 16 or 32 GB would definitely help
- SSD - is there any point in using SSD for anything else than the scratch disk, e.g. as a system disk?
- GPU - does CS6 profit from larger GPU VRAM? All I can find in Adobe documentation is that you need at least 512 MB VRAM to do 3D work in Photoshop, but nothing else. Every GPU nowadays has at least that memory, so is any GPU good enough then? Or will buying a 4 GB higher-mainstream GPU help?
- any other idea?
