RX 480 8gb vs GTX1060 6gb

OK so currently have a system running LR6 on Win7. 3570K, 512gb ssd, 16gb ram, and an old R7 290 on a 24" 1920x1200 resolution monitor... problem is Lightroom has been laggy as all get out and I recently decided to upgrade a little...

Moving up to a 3770K, 1tb SSD, 32gb ram and a 27" 3860x2160 LG monitor. So obviously I needed to up the GPU power in order to push the 4k monitor, but I am at a quandary...

The ONLY intensive apps are the Adobe suite... Lightrooms laggardly performance and my desire for more resolution prompted the upgrade but now I am not sure which GPU is better... since gaming plays no role in my decision it was simply best GPU for the situation in that price range...

Bang for the buck the RX 480 8GB sounds right but I thought it was told way back when that Nvidia Cuda cores render better and work smoother with Adobe products than the AMD product... so does that mean for my application the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB is the better choice since all I am doing is working in Adobe?

werds wrote in post #18166739
OK so currently have a system running LR6 on Win7. 3570K, 512gb ssd, 16gb ram, and an old R7 290 on a 24" 1920x1200 resolution monitor... problem is Lightroom has been laggy as all get out and I recently decided to upgrade a little...

Moving up to a 3770K, 1tb SSD, 32gb ram and a 27" 3860x2160 LG monitor. So obviously I needed to up the GPU power in order to push the 4k monitor, but I am at a quandary...

The ONLY intensive apps are the Adobe suite... Lightrooms laggardly performance and my desire for more resolution prompted the upgrade but now I am not sure which GPU is better... since gaming plays no role in my decision it was simply best GPU for the situation in that price range...

Bang for the buck the RX 480 8GB sounds right but I thought it was told way back when that Nvidia Cuda cores render better and work smoother with Adobe products than the AMD product... so does that mean for my application the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB is the better choice since all I am doing is working in Adobe?

Outputting 4k resolution in a non gaming application doesn't require much GPU power. Basically any GPU, including CPU integrated, with DisplayPort 1.2 will output 4k@60Hz. Gaming is another matter entirely.

Lightroom does not gain much from any GPU, from budget to top tier, and in many cases having GPU acceleration enabled can actually cause Lightroom to be slower. There are many reports of Adobe products running better with Nvidia GPU's, not sure how accurate they are for newer versions of Adobe software.

Is there actually a r7 290? I've only heard of r9 290 which is a decent card with 4gb vram which should be more than enough for photo editing even at 4k
http://gpuboss.com …290-vs-GeForce-GTX-750-Ti

I just upgraded my system to a i7-6700K (4.0ghz), with hyperX 16gb or ddr4 ram and evo 500gb SSD. My 27 inch monitor requires a dedicated video card simply due to the 2560x1440 resolution. Also installed an Asus GTX 1060 3gb card. I didn't really feel the need to spend more money on a video card for my application.

Even overclocking my computer to a respectable 4.5 ghz I still find exporting with LR6 a slow pig. I do not think I'd see a big difference buying a slightly more expensive Samsung Pro SSD either. tech spec sheets and real life can possibly be only micro seconds in faster speed differences.

Nvidia is a recommended GPU for adobe products.

In the US computer parts seem to be substantially cheaper than CDN $$$. What I found was that looking for older generation (GPU) video cards seemed hard to find as they get kicked off the market very quickly as the new gen GPU's start getting installed on dedicated vid cards.

I do some minimal video edits so I wanted to have a decent dedicated GPU. However for pure still photos I'd probably go for any respectable dedicated card so that you can produce higher res for larger monitors. Going with a high end video cards is a waste of money IMO for stills.

My other i5 system reacts like a slow pig too with with the onboard GPU. Color calibration wise I see no difference using a dedicated card or onboard built in video port. My spyder 5pro is good enough for what I need for colour calibration of high gamut monitors.

LR6 is not very fast for exporting. If your importing or exporting Fuji Raw files it's even more disgustingly slow compared to my Canon RAW files.

I have a Dell XPS 8900 with i7 6700 processor, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD/2TB HDD and a nVidia GTX 960/2 GB video card. I went with that card as I also chose the Dell UP2715K monitor, which requires dual DP1.2 to drive the 5120×2880 resolution screen at 60Hz, so the built in graphics, with only single DP 1.2 output would not drive the monitor at maximum resolution. LR runs much better than on my old computer system, but then it should be better than a nearly ten year old Core 2 Duo laptop with 3 GB Ram and a 256 GB HDD. The GPU acceleration seems to make zero difference, I guess that an i7 6007 processor is as much as it can use. From what I have read it is Adobe Premiere that is the heavy user of CUDA cores, so unless you are doing video it shouldn't make too much difference to performance. My system didn't offer an AMD choice for the GPU so that didn't come into it for me, although I do plan on doing some video editing using Premiere, so the nVidia card will help with that.

Alan

If I still used my Dell Ultrasharp 24" monitor I would not have purchased a dedicated video card. IIRC my U2410 I'd only require 1920x1200.

With my calibrated 24" on my i5 system it does just as well as my brand new overclocked 4.5ghz i7 skylake system when I'm exporting from LR6.

Depending on your monitor I'd rather spend extra money on a high gamut colour IPS monitor and spend decent on a dedicated GPU but not "gaming" power. This is why I did not spend more money on a 3gb Vram gtx 1060.

Thinking out loud....I'd probably spend alot less on a GPU but spend way more on a killer IPS high gamut monitor. Super high res isn't a big deal for me either since when you print your simply printing 300 dpi low res.

I prefer my U2410 over my ultrasharp high gamut 27" Dell monitor. Spend wisely on your monitor.

Even going to more ram like 32gb will very likely make any difference for your still photography.

Yes it is an R9 290 but it is a 2GB variant Last time I put together this system (which was a few years back) I built it on a budget knowing I was not going to be gaming...

Yes, upgrading from a TN panel monitor that I have had for I think 8 years now? To an IPS 4k Monitor (budgeted 600 for it). I love my 4K monitors at work and am wanting the extra work space the resolution will provide. The 1TB ssd was a planned upgrade for the last year or so, the RAM from 16gb to 32GB is just a cheap upgrade tbh...

Only reason I was aiming at RX 980 8GB and the GTX 1060 6GB variants was because I do not plan on upgrading for several years afterwards and wanted cards that should be fairly capable until I upgrade again (considering I used to upgrade my computers at an interval of every 4 to 6 months at one point in my life, waiting a couple years between upgrades for me is restraint )

OK so basically there is no consensus on the gpu's and pretty much either one would be fine if not overkill for my purposes. Hmmm hopefully having more SSD space will help even out the lag in LR6... or maybe there will be some improvements from Adobe on that front

Thanks for the input and information guys!

werds,

Just enjoy your new build. If anything you'll benefit more overclocking your CPU vs having a top level GPU overclocked for still photo post processing.

Do your research on SSD speed. For me I should have purchased a Samsung pro or higher end Intel SSD. The beauty of using Macrium Reflect "free" imaging software is that I can buy whatever latest SSD down the road. All I would do is just drop the disk image on to a virgin SSD drive and have a higher performing SSD. That's why I went cheap and bought a Samsung EVO 850 500gb drive.

Chasing newer computer speeds is like a 1/4mile drag car throwing $$$$$$ shaving 10th of a second of their time slip....been there done that

I'll spend decent coin on a non 4k high gamut monitor since stills do not require such resolutions. Plenty of time for 4k to become more mainstream for consumers. Very simple to put a new monitor on the desk I'd be better off buying a more sophisticated water cooling system for overclocking a CPU for tangible results instead of visual candy with 4k. My very basic needs the cool master Hyper 212 works reasonably well.

My 5yrs old Sandy bridge i7 is still fast enough to do everything I need.

Great thing about configuring your own computer is that you can buy everything you want with every spec imaginable.

Check out a cheap Corsair Carbide series 330R silent tower. Not eyecandy but nice looking and it's dead silent with ample cooling. Brainless motherboard install too

I'll say LR really sucks in speed though. I still cant get over how slow LR exports with my new overclocked system even with SSD, DDR4 etc etc. No more chasing for more speed for at least 4-5yrs.....I'll just do simple upgrades down the road.

Have fun building your beast

You won't gain much if anything by upgrading Samsung Pro ssds if you already have EVO.
http://www.tomshardwar​e.co.uk …eal-world-difference.html

Second is better as specs

Thanks guys! I ended up going with the cheaper RX480 8GB since there was a sale on that specific model. As for monitor i purchase an LG 27UD68-P since it has freesync in case I ever do game, I liked how thin the bezel "looks", the specs looked decent enough and now that I have it installed with an Amazon Basics Monitor arm it looks sexy (and allows super simple adjustments). I know you guys said the extra resolution isn't needed in LR... but I LOVE the extra screen real estate that it feels like I have... sad thing is that this resolution has made me realize I may need to upgrade to Win 10 Win 7 overall the elements scale poorly.

So far the processing has definitely sped up (moving around sliders, seeing live adjustents etc) and exporting is not choking the machine as bad as it was before the upgrades were tossed in. So was it probably overkill? Yea... but then again it should mean that I won't have a NEED to upgrade much for a while :P

werds wrote in post #18170315
Thanks guys! I ended up going with the cheaper RX480 8GB since there was a sale on that specific model. As for monitor i purchase an LG 27UD68-P since it has freesync in case I ever do game, I liked how thin the bezel "looks", the specs looked decent enough and now that I have it installed with an Amazon Basics Monitor arm it looks sexy (and allows super simple adjustments). I know you guys said the extra resolution isn't needed in LR... but I LOVE the extra screen real estate that it feels like I have... sad thing is that this resolution has made me realize I may need to upgrade to Win 10 Win 7 overall the elements scale poorly.

So far the processing has definitely sped up (moving around sliders, seeing live adjustents etc) and exporting is not choking the machine as bad as it was before the upgrades were tossed in. So was it probably overkill? Yea... but then again it should mean that I won't have a NEED to upgrade much for a while :P

Personally I think Win 10 even has OSX beat on the screen scaling front, no matter what size monitor you are using. My friend has the previous 2560×1440 iMac and has to run it in a lower than standard resolution to that he can read it, due to eyesight issues, even with his glasses on. Actually he has issues with a 15" 1280 pixel wide laptop screen, which he runs at lower than native. To my eyes the screens look really bad thanks to trying to scale them in that way. With Win 10 all you need do is set the scaling to 125% or 150% on a normal display, or any of the greater than 200% options on my 5120×2880 monitor. All of the screen elements get bigger, including images in a browser, which on an HTML page scale too, although just bring up a JPEG file and you get the scaling go back to "native", so you can see everything really well, but you are still seeing the monitor at native resolution, so things like font smoothing work very well indeed. It's so good that I can set a screen size he can read, and still look at all of the larger elements without seeing artifacts, so we both win. He spent about 3× as a minimum buying the iMac for what he wants to do, and then runs it with the monitor looking that bad that he might as well have spent £300 on a complete computer system, including a cheap large screen 1920×1080 screen.

Alan

good choice but if you ever want to play games, at least the more demanding ones like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Witcher 3 you may need something better than the RX 480 to run at 4K. not sure how well it will run in Crossfire though

BigAl007 wrote in post #18170838
Personally I think Win 10 even has OSX beat on the screen scaling front, no matter what size monitor you are using. My friend has the previous 2560×1440 iMac and has to run it in a lower than standard resolution to that he can read it, due to eyesight issues, even with his glasses on. Actually he has issues with a 15" 1280 pixel wide laptop screen, which he runs at lower than native. To my eyes the screens look really bad thanks to trying to scale them in that way. With Win 10 all you need do is set the scaling to 125% or 150% on a normal display, or any of the greater than 200% options on my 5120×2880 monitor. All of the screen elements get bigger, including images in a browser, which on an HTML page scale too, although just bring up a JPEG file and you get the scaling go back to "native", so you can see everything really well, but you are still seeing the monitor at native resolution, so things like font smoothing work very well indeed. It's so good that I can set a screen size he can read, and still look at all of the larger elements without seeing artifacts, so we both win. He spent about 3× as a minimum buying the iMac for what he wants to do, and then runs it with the monitor looking that bad that he might as well have spent £300 on a complete computer system, including a cheap large screen 1920×1080 screen.

Alan

Just installed Win 10 overnight and you are right the scaling on practically everything is fairly nice! Well... that was until I opened up Lightroom and saw this mess Any help on how to make the dropdown menu text to scale up and the ugly Develop bar to shrink would be appreciated!

FuturamaJSP wrote in post #18171706
good choice but if you ever want to play games, at least the more demanding ones like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Witcher 3 you may need something better than the RX 480 to run at 4K. not sure how well it will run in Crossfire though

True, but with how hectic my life is I am almost dead certain gaming won't happen, and I could always down-res the monitor during gaming right?