Photo Editing at 2k Resolution

sam01cox · Mar 30, 2018

Hi there, I am a professional garden photographer who is looking at investing in a new monitor as my last one (1280 x 1024) has died. I've been looking at 2k monitors and am impressed with the reviews which suggest significantly better image quality than my old monitor. Now obviously 2k requires a bit more power from my PC so I am thinking about upgrading my graphics card. I am also aware that photo editing is highly reliant on the CPU but I haven't had any problems with my i5 2400 @3.1Ghz.

My current graphics card is an AMD Radeon 6450 which has done the job for many years but I suspect moving to 2k might be too much to ask from it. My son has built his own gaming PC last year and is quite knowledgeable when it comes to PC spec and performance but because gaming is a much higher demanding task from the PC he doesn't know how demanding photo editing is on the graphics card. My motherboard isn't the newest thing out there, the PCIe x16 slot still uses the 2.0 bus. I was looking at Nvidia's previous graphics card models and by the looks of things the GeForce GT 730 is the newest most powerful one that still uses the old PCIe 2.0 bus to run the GPU.

Here is my question...

Will there be a significant improvement in performance if i upgrade from the AMD to the GeForce GT 730? If so will the GT 730 be capable of getting the most out of a 2k monitor?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Please answer if you can. Thanks a lot. Ray

Solandri · Mar 30, 2018

2D graphics like photo editing is trivial for a video card. Your 7-year old card should be able to handle what I'm assuming is 2560x1440 resolution just fine. The only difference a new video card would make is a few graphics filters will run faster if your photo editing program supports GPU-acceleration for those filters. And loading of RAW files can be quicker if your RAW processor supports GPU-acceleration (and you have it enabled).

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cc-gpu-card-faq.html

Outside of photo editing, an old GPU like yours may have some problems with newer video formats (particularly videos encoded with h.265, which are becoming more common). Since your GPU can't decode these newer videos in hardware, it ends up dumping the job onto your CPU which consequently has to work harder. Not a big deal if you're just watching a movie on your PC. But if you're trying to run a task in the background (like a batch photo conversion from RAW to JPEG) while watching the video, it will proceed a bit more slowly (I'd estimate about 10%-25% slower) than if you got a newer video card due to more of the CPU's cycles being diverted to decode the video.

sam01cox · Mar 31, 2018

Solandri :

2D graphics like photo editing is trivial for a video card. Your 7-year old card should be able to handle what I'm assuming is 2560x1440 resolution just fine. The only difference a new video card would make is a few graphics filters will run faster if your photo editing program supports GPU-acceleration for those filters. And loading of RAW files can be quicker if your RAW processor supports GPU-acceleration (and you have it enabled).

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cc-gpu-card-faq.html

Outside of photo editing, an old GPU like yours may have some problems with newer video formats (particularly videos encoded with h.265, which are becoming more common). Since your GPU can't decode these newer videos in hardware, it ends up dumping the job onto your CPU which consequently has to work harder. Not a big deal if you're just watching a movie on your PC. But if you're trying to run a task in the background (like a batch photo conversion from RAW to JPEG) while watching the video, it will proceed a bit more slowly (I'd estimate about 10%-25% slower) than if you got a newer video card due to more of the CPU's cycles being diverted to decode the video.

sam01cox · Mar 31, 2018

Thanks alot, that was really helpful and greatly appreciated. In the end we discovered we had to upgrade the graphics card anyway, because the HDMI (1.0 I think) port did NOT support 2k resolution. But none the less your answer was reasuring and I will definitely look into enableing GPU acceleration for graphics filters. Thanks again, Ray

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