Do I need a dedicated GPU for Photoshop?

[Rodmantis]

Hi, I'm buying a laptop purely for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, most of the laptops now carry Sandy Bridge so I'm going with a core i5, but in my country, the difference between the i5 laptops with and without dedicated graphic cards is about $300. How much difference does the graphic card do compared to HD 3000 graphics in photoshop and illustrator?

 

[nforce4max]

For most situations you won't have much to gain from there being a discrete gpu unless you have the plugins for mercury playback engine exct for using Cuda on a Nvidia based gpu. If you are not using it for media encoding but just image editing and modeling don't bother and save the $300. Personally try to hunt for a laptop that has a quad core as it will be much faster for your needs than the i5.

 

[scout_03]

dedicated in laptop means card have is own memory check on adobe for the requirements for the one you want to use