Ok, this is a followup to my earlier Photoshop question. Say I buy a desktop computer...?

Question

How much would a dual-core processor benefit my working in Photoshop, as opposed to a single-core? Is the increased productivity, in your opinion, worth the added expense?

Answer 1

My own experience with Photoshop on multiprocessor machines has been very positive. While I don't have actual numbers from my own tests, you can look at these Photoshop/Dual Core articles and benchmarks:



First source: "Adobe Photoshop CS is a graphic artist's übertool: Hardly any graphic art work can get done without it. We tested the Opteron whitebox with Photoshop CS, and it shows some improvement over the already speedy Pentium EE 840. Out of the eight filters, the Opteron wins three of the tests, and on the others is only a second behind. The Pentium EE 840 took 2.5 times longer to complete the wave filter which skews the results, but excluding that time, the results are nearly identical overall. Both the dual-core Pentium EE 840 and dual-core, dual-CPU Opteron workstations are formidable PhotoShop platforms, and both would service a graphic artist well."



See the benchmarks on this first source's link.



Second source: "There is no doubt that a program like Photoshop will be much faster on a dual core system than its single core counterpart. The majority of operating systems do recognize and support at least two processors. There is some load balancing of non-SMP applications but not as efficiently as those written for multithreading."

Answer 2

For the user to benefit from dual-core processors, you'd need Photoshop to recognize and efficiently use both processors. Unfortunately that's not the case right now although I'm sure Adobe is working on a dual-core aware version.



Since the current version doesn't see the second core, it would operate and behave as if the system only had a single core. In this situation, the only benefit of a dual-core setup is allowing you to multitask (Photoshop processing an image, have an FTP program uploading to a website, burn a DVD, listen to music, etc) at the same time without too much of a performance hit. If that's something that you envision yourself doing, it might be worth it.



On the other hand, if you tend to do only one or two tasks at the same time, it would be better to spend the money on things such as maxing out your memory capacity, getting a 10,000 rpm hard drive (instead of the usual 7,200 rpm), possibly getting a RAID 0 hard drive setup for faster read/writes, or getting a faster processor.



Even if a dual-core enabled version of Photoshop came out and you took advantage of it, you wouldn't necessarily have a 100% improvement in Photoshop (maybe not even half). Optimizing the computer for Photoshop can be a better choice if everything is set up properly (having scratch area on a separate hard drive, having gobs of RAM, etc).



Edit: I just read the second person's reply. Unfortunately one of the articles compares Intel's dual-core processor to AMD's dual-core processor, so it's not saying much about how it compares to single-core CPUs. Also, you have to be careful about reviews. The Pentium 4 EE dual-core has twice as much cache as a single-core Pentium 4 and would obviously fare better. Unfortunately, I have yet to come across a single-core Pentium 4 EE versus dual-core Pentium 4 EE using Photoshop as a benchmark.

Answer 3

Not sure,though a computer with high memory 500k+ min is important.