Looking for a PC in the Philippines with these sort of specifications:

Because I based it on this advice: Nvidia cards have CUDA and OPENCL support for Photoshop etc ATI cards only have OPENCL support but slightly faster then the GTX960 and cheaper

given your usage (Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc)., the graphics card is very much secondary. With the adobe photo applications, the graphics card is only used to assist when applying some special effects (see list at bottom). Its impact is more noticeable with video editing, when using the mercury playback engine, but there's little difference between a high end NVidia card and a low-end NVidia card for this purpose.

I don't have benchmarks for the Radeon cards but my understanding was that Nvidia cards are still the better choice for someone whose primary use is Adobe CSS. So although the R9 280 is a better card for gaming, given your usage I would actually probably try and source an old GTX760 - assuming you are using the effects listed (at bottom). Although the GTX960 is newer, the 760 has a wider bus interface and higher memory bandwidth. If working with relatively small images (say, 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels) the 960 would be fine, but if working with small images, you could even get away with something like the GTX750Ti. The important thing on the video card is the number of CUDA cores and the memory bus width (which determines the bandwidth). The 750Ti only has a 128 bit bus, so struggles with higher resolution images (say, multi-layered images of 5000 by 5000 pixels or more).

  • and if the plan is to do any gaming on this machine, I would simply say to bite the bullet and get the GTX970. Photoshop 6 effects/tools that are NVidia GPU accelerated (many of these are not available on Windows XP, but I'm guessing you will be on Win7/8/10):

  • Adaptive Wide Angle Filter

  • Liquify

  • Warp and Puppet Warp

  • Oil Paint

  • Lighting Effects Gallery

  • 3D enhancements: Draggable Shadows; Ground plane reflections; Roughness; On-canvas UI controls; Ground plane; Light widgets on edge of canvas; IBL (image based light) controller.

  • Scrubby Zoom

  • Heads Up Display (HUD) color picker

  • Color sampling ring

  • Brush dynamic resize and hardness control

  • Bristle Brush tip previews

  • Rule of thirds crop grid overlay

  • Zoom enhancements

  • Temporary zoom on an image.

  • Animated transitions for one-stop zoom

  • Flick-panning

  • Rotate the canvas

  • View non-square pixel images

  • Pixel grid

  • Adobe Color Engine (ACE)

  • Draw Brush tip cursors

I'm not sure which of the above work with Radeon cards. It's possible that some do. I know that all work with NVidia cards.

the following effects are definitely OpenCL accelerated (and so will definitely work on Radeon cards as well) Field Blur Tilt/Shift Iris Blur

AND THIS

there's a small bit of older games get the GTX 750 which doubles performance. The GT 740 is strictly just for the CUDA cores. The GT 730 also does fine and has the same number of CUDA cores here but you'd need a specific model as there's two versions to them. (Kepler 64bit is better than Fermi 128bit)

Get the cheaper ones ( a GTX 750Ti.)

The GTX 650 would be the equivalent of the GT 740 and after that most of them hit heavy diminishing returns. The Quadro K2000 is also the equivalent to the GTX 650/GT 740 in the professional benchmarks but the workstation cards also have better driver support.

/r/Philippines Thread Parent