Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I am looking to buy a basic new laptop / computer. Aside from surfing the internet, I will use it primarily for processing photos, something at which I am very much a beginner at (I much more enjoy taking photos rather than processing them). I want to get and learn Lightroom and CS4 perhaps.

Question: How important is discrete video memory (this is the term used on the Future Shop website)? Can a laptop without this process photos efficiently? Is a machine without this recommended for photo processing?

Thanks for your help in advance!

A decent video card with its own memory (not shared) is quite important, you can still use any kind, but for CS4 you will benefit from GPU enabled one. I will let our computer geeks tell you the whole story from now on

CS4 is only GPU enabled for certain filters.

If your using this as a photo editing machine I would recommend a system with lots of RAM, and fast and large hard drives.

The hard drives in a laptop are generally not that fast.

Keep in mind, the slowest thing in a computer is and has been the hard disks.

About buying a computer from FS.... Well, thats just... personal preference, will bite my tongue further than that.

Discrete video memory is a major performance boost when using any memory-intensive applications (like any processing software) as it eliminates the memory access conflicts that happen when both the GPU and CPU are trying to access main memory. These aren't an issue with most uses, but when a single program is using significant portions of your RAM these access conflicts can seriously impact both UI responsiveness and application performance.


The usually more powerful GPU that also comes with systems with discrete video memory is actually irrelevant for your uses.

open GL drawing in CS4 depends on your video card. If you don't have it, forget about the seamless zooming and navigation. It'll be old school jagged

Discrete memory wins here. Plus I really don't like it when some of my memory that could be used for the OS, apps, etc. has been designated for the video card. Using main memory instead of memory specific for graphics is used to reduce the cost primarily I believe.

I think the real answer is: It's nice to have and makes things a tad faster, but not necessary with the newer chipsets. Yes, it can process photos efficiently provided processor is fast enough and you have enough RAM.

I don't think you will be happy with a "basic" laptop for photo processing, especially if you intend to use programs that require a lot of processing power.

First off the screens on "basic" laptops are lousy at best...they don't show the full colour spectrum, the glossy ones are especially bad as will see reflections. Just as there are different levels of monitors for desktops, you can get laptops with different quality screens.

Second, for a "basic" laptop expect programs like PS and LR to take longer to load and do certain operations. I recently upgraded the editing software I use on my laptop to the latest version and it now takes more than three times longer to load, so I keep the older version of the software on it too for those times I'm in a hurry.

Now I've been picking on your use of "basic", but if a laptop is something that you are seriously considering buying see if you can arrange to see Photoshop running on the machine you're interested in (although I doubt FutureShop would do that). Of course it depends on your definition of "basic" too.

If you can get 2gig of ram in it, do it (if you intend to edit photos). The basic 512K setup just drags (I started with 512K but with 2gig it's so much smoother, less trips to the hard drive for virtual memory).

Generally speaking basic laptops have enough processor power these days. Just max out on RAM and you will be good to go.

There's quite a few $500- laptops with 3-4gigs of ram, 250gig or larger HD's, 15" screens with a 2ghz dual-core or equiv CPU.

I would consider that the bare minimum for PS use. That would put netbooks with the 1.6ghz Atom processors w/ only 1gig of ram out of the running unless you're _very_ patient or only do minimal editing.

If you want a laptop with a video card with dedicated memory, be prepared for prices closer to $1000-.

You will take a noticeable performance hit doing PS on any shared memory system. The improvements with new chipsets are entirely related to GPU performance which isn't the source of the performance problem in the first place. The source of the problem is the fact that the GPU and CPU cannot access the memory at the same time and when you are running software which uses a large amount of RAM and generates anything resembling a fair number of screen redraws you will have memory access contention problems. PS is the classic example of this problem being a memory-intensive application which updates the screen regularly.