Photo editing laptop - dedicated graphics card worth it?

shotokan101

Though Adobe recently announced an update that does allow better use of gpu.....

12harry

Isn't it surprising that Mfrs don't make  laptops slightly bigger ?, A "prestige model" could avoid the heat issue and space for a larger battery, - for times when you don't have an external power source (( Which is surely one of the main advantages of a laptop )).
Of course there would still remain the size of Screen, as this largely determines the price.

Whilst you can get  "Fan-bases" these really demonstrate the poor thinking of Mfrs who believe the Public are stupid enough to believe a thin ( and cramped) product is better than one with more stamina. In addition this insistence in small components usually means lower-reliability ( due to heat) and higher cost . . . esp. when it comes to replace the Battery!

On my Desktop, I do my Editing (Sills Video) via my 42" TV, using the HDMI o/p from a very modest graphics card. Whilst this would not support much "Gaming" - it's perfectly OK for editing HD video. However, it's 8yrs old and being a 32-bit system, the max memory is poor, by today's standards. New software needs a 64-bit OS.

Has OP fixed his search for a £500 Laptop?

Johnmcl7

The question worth asking is what benefit does that bring as image processing is more difficult to make good use of the GPU as you're generally doing lots of small changes reasonably slowly.  Video rendering/transcoding on the other hand can take advantage of additional processing as it's a huge amount of constant heavy work to produce the output.  There are heavier use cases with Lightroom such as stitching panoramas which I've been doing this evening with around ~24 20MP raw images, I've been keeping an eye on resources but it's not been that heavy on the CPU using three out of the available six but it is hammering the RAM, during the stitching process it's nearly maxing out the 32GB ram which is impressive.  

While editing these panoramas which are huge it is sluggish but then according to task manager the system is mostly idling.  I'm not using the latest version of Lightroom although it seems to be a frequent complaint that it doesn't make use of available hardware resources.

shotokan101

Batch processing, preprocessing on imports, post processing on exports, fullsize preview building on imports..

Johnmcl7

None of those are processor intensive though, if you watch your CPU during those tasks you'll see it's not doing much and it can be difficult to assist with more random tasks like that.  I'm always a bit wary of claims of GPU assist where there's less scope for improvement and also raw 3D performance doesn't necessarily translate to GPU assist performance as Intel's Quicksync demonstrated offering impressive transcode accelerate on an integrated GPU.

Hence why I was advising to check what the actual benefits are before making a decision on it, if it's needed for gaming that makes the case a lot easier because there's a large benefit for a decent discrete GPU there.

273K

Yes, I've decided I'm getting an iMac!

shotokan101