Graphics cards - which is better?

Dinarius

I have these two cards on separate machines:

NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS

and.....

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700/PCI/SSE2


The second one is the one on my new machine. Both computers are used for image editing. My first impression is that the preview images are not as sharp wtih the new one, but I'm just wondering if I'm imagining things? All settings in both Photoshop CS3 and Bridge are the same on both computers.

Thanks.

D.

nilhg

I would imagine any difference you can see is more to do with your monitors than the cards, both of them should be at their ease with photographs.

shrapnel222

+1

the differences would be down to your monitor calibrations. both are nvidia cards so would not expect much difference at all with regards to photos- but nvidia has never been great for photos in any event.

5uspect

The Geforce is a gaming card and the Quadro is a CAD card. The Geforce lacks the precision of the Quadro for 3D stuff but both should be fine for 2D graphics.

Dinarius

Many thanks for the replies.

While I accept that nothing fancy is needed for photo editing in visual terms, it has been said that, with the huge files some of us are now handling (I process 220Mb TIFFs from a Hasselblad) the graphics card's ability to open and close the images (in conjunction with tons of RAM and a very fast CPU) is very important.

i.e. Thiese files mean that it's no longer JUST about CPU and RAM, but the GC and its RAM too.

So, with this in mind, which card do you prefer now?

Or an alternative?

Thanks.

D.

nilhg

I could be completely wrong in this but my understanding is that the reason graphics cards became so powerful is to process higher and higher FPS in high resolution 3D games. when you open a photo in PS or the like its held in main system RAM and only the portion of it displayed on your screen is held in graphics memory, so if your screen resolution is 1600*1200 then you need only enough memory to display that many pixels at whatever colour quality you are using ( If you are in a graphics environment and using multiple displays then obviously more ooomph is needed)

In short its the 3d part of games that stresses cards and 2D pictures should be no problem.

Again I could be wrong in this, and if I am would be delighted to learn more.

shrapnel222

thought this might be of interest

(Translated from Tweakers.net)

"Adobe is working on a new version of Photoshop that will harness the power of your GPU (Graphic/Gaming card) and Physics card. The graphical environment would in that case be the first mainstream product that will make use of this technology.

The past few years Adobe has primarily focused and made progress in the CPU area, think of higher clock speeds or dual core, which made their applications run faster. For some applications however just CPU progress isn't enough, because some applications make use of very large files and memory and needs a lot of graphic calculations. The main solution for this problem would be to use multiple processors, like extra CPU's, GPU's or Physics-processors.

One of the programs that gets in trouble the fastest with 'The Great Wait' when in high-usage is Photoshop. According to the TG Daily this will soon all change. Creative Suite Next, that includes the next version of Photoshop, codenamed Stonehenge, will soon support GPU and Physics acceleration. Next to that the graphic application has been given support for dual core processing. If everything will go as planned the release should be scheduled for a release on 1 October.

The primary result after this addition will be that changing extremely large images will have less of a waiting-period. During the demonstration an Adobe employee showed that zooming in, out, and rotating on a canvas the size of 2GB with a 442 mega pixel resolution is smooth and without any amount of wait or lag, also when importing a 3D model into Photoshop Extended, adding text or paint to the 3D object's surface, and the rendering of the new 3D object, all without any type of delay."

but on top of that, i think matrox have always been regarded the best GPUs when it comes to 2D rendering and photography