Photo Editing Video Card Recomendation (64-bit Windows 8)

cdness · Aug 5, 2013

A family member of mine runs a photography business out of her home. Recently I was called over there to look at her computer she uses for Photoshop and Lightroom. After a couple hours of testing many different versions of drivers I figured her video card is pretty much dead. I rolled her back to her on-board video for the time being.

So my experience in video cards is in the gaming side where rendering of graphics and polygons is the performance indicator. I was wondering if some of the pros or semi-pros on here could let me know of a current video card they would recommend getting so I can narrow down my research a bit. Her computer is a ASUS PC running 64-bit Windows 8.

Let me know if you have any other system related questions.

Acro76 · Aug 8, 2013

I'd buy last years gaming card on the cheap and put more money into ram and SSD Drives. There is a huge boost in performance switching to SSD, and you can set up photoshop to use an extra SSD as a scratch disk for even more memory... which really helps when editing large RAW files. I used to be able to only edit 10-15 files at a time, now I can do 100+ easy. Batch operations are also smoother.

That being said, I believe the Nvidia Quadro line is more for workstations and CAD imaging, and other imaging technologies...