i7 and REAL photoshop benchmarks

[cyberjt]

OK, this may be a little selfish, but I am currently debating the i7 920 (with 6GB DDR3) vs Q9550 (with 8GB DDR2) for my upgrade (moving of a P4 830D - when a VM on my Macbook is faster than my main machine I know it is time to upgrade!).

The main main thing I use the machine for these days is photoshop (CS3) and lightroom, I very rarely play games. The only PS benchmarks I have seen so far, do not suggest too much advance for the i7 but these are all based on tiny <70MB TIFF files with a few filters. Most of what I do is in the 500MB -1.5GB range 16bit images with loads of layers (yes it takes that much to make most of the models look like they do in those images! when printing A3+). Has anyone seen any proper benchmarking of the i7 platform with photoshop? Main reason for asking is with a finite amount of money I am wondering whether to add storage to my NAS with savings on going the Q9550 route.

http://www.ukshots.com

 

[SharpieFiend]

Thanks for the HUGE pic (oh well, adblock took care of it). Anyway, you'll see a difference between the i7 and C2Q due to the greater memory performance on the i7, especially if you're dealing with large files.

 

[cyberjt]

97K huge? ask santa for broadband at christmas

I had realised that the the added bandwidth should give better performance on large files, what I want to see is the numbers - since all the run-ups to the NDA said that PS benchmarks should give excellent performace boost - this has yet to be seen in the benchmarks I have seen so far for the i7 and PS (it is certainly there for 3D and video renderers I know)

 

[Trepidati0n]

Actually the i7 with 12GB of RAM and with a very large RAM drive might be just the ticket for photochoppers. Put 6GB towards PS and bam.

 

[wolf2009]

What is in those 1GB image files, I have never seen them.

Please explain

 

[Thejavaman1]

Admittedly most of my files don't end up being quite as large as yours do, but I do most of my shooting with a Hasselblad H2 and PhaseOne P25 combo these days on a Q6600 and found the biggest speed increase came from dedicating a couple of gigs to a RAM disk for the photoshop swap file. If you use tons of filters the faster CPU might help more, but I found that most of the delays come from when photoshop has to go to the disk to grab the data. Really, I'd go for as much RAM as you can get and setup a large RAM disk just for swap, it'll make switching between files and such just fly.

 

[Thejavaman1]

What is in those 1GB image files, I have never seen them.

Please explain

If you shoot with a MF digital back and do a lot of editing, 1GB+ files are not at all crazy. I use a P25 which is a 22MP back and quite "out of date" at this point (PhaseOne just announced the P65+ at 60MP). A 22MP 16bit file opens up at 128MB, layer it a few times and upres it for printing and you are easily looking at over a gig per file. When I make really large prints (40x60) the files can be upwards of 5GB or so.

 

[cyberjt]

What is in those 1GB image files, I have never seen them.

Please explain

Take 1 average 12MP image in 16Bit (in my case from a D300, respect to Thejavaman1 I would like a Medium format option!) - add a couple of layers for spot removal, line removal etc (clear layers with spot tool etc, helaing brush), add a couple of partial layers constructed from the cut and paste of the merge to do either digital lipo, or patch alterations. Create a couple of merge layers for filtering on (usually things like skin toning etc, or desats for blending to alter tones), add three (1xface/skin, 1xclothes, 1xgeneral) filled 50% neuteral density layers in overlay for dodging and burning on. Add several curve layers for colour tweaking etc. Also keep in mind that nearly all these layers also will have a full bitmap layer mask, and you may soon see how I get such large files!

The RAM disk idea is an interesting one which I may pursue - I am still trying to decide if to go for sata as main/swap drives or stick with the 10K SCSI that I have at the moment (storage is in SATA RAID 1 arrays - although will probably keep existing machine and move the storage access to over iSCSI).