What to upgrade for Photoshop? CPU? GPU? RAM? 

Glad it was helpful!

Totally agree...

I’d expect big improvements, but files that big will always be a bit slow until we have multi-core compression, unless you’re willing to save uncompressed.

It’s an approach for whatever software / use you think is importantly for performance. Software performance changes over time, so it’s just giving you a good estimate.

Actually we do have one. It's made by Puget Systems and it's called "PugetBench for Photoshop". It has shown for a very long time now time now that Photoshop is massively single threaded, meaning it is atrociously bad at using all the core of our modern cpus, and that it uses almost no gpu. Just like what this video is illustrating.

I have a free PS benchmark designed to test for the needs of Photographers: G-Bench. gregbenzphotography.com/other/g-bench-benchmark-for-photoshop/

I’ll post a review of the M1 soon. I wanted to focus here more on general principles you can use to assess any computer.

Those previews are a heavy lift for disk, CPU, and RAM. Not surprising even on fast machines. I’d check to see which apps are eating RAM. Monterey has reported memory leaks with some apps (such as Mail I think).

Yeah, awesome film and I love the soundtrack. I listen to a lot of Hans Zimmer while working. Good energy, and music with lyrics tend to distract me too much for work.

@@gregbenzphotography Yes, I love Hans Zimmers music too! Sometimes I find it a little to..explosive..and therefore distracting. I listen to a lot of instrumental music like Carbon Based Lifeforms while editing to help me zone out :)

Glad you found it so helpful!

Same process for reviewing things

​@@gregbenzphotography right but I know I have a gpu bottleneck. When I use the denoise feature in lightroom my rtx 2070 is being utilized to the max and I just walk way from my computer while it works and come back later. The thing to determine is which gpu to upgrade to? Lots of videos show gpu benchmarks for gaming but that's not how we need to measure things in the photography space. I don't know what metrics I'm supposed to be looking at when all the benchmarks are for pc gamers.

@nathanielmartin6631 that’s why I have a Photoshop benchmark (G-Bench) and showed how to read the bottlenecks for CPU and GPU. I’m not aware of metrics in the operating system specific to subsystems like a neural chip. When I did the testing for this video, AI was already a thing (GigaPixel AI was part of my background testing). Ultimately, when you get specific instructions sets, you’ll have to test actual hardware, but you can use my tests to see if you’re at the limits or not (ie find the current bottleneck).

Windows 10 and 11 has fixed these problems

@@fintonmainz7845 compared to Macs? Nope. Compared to previous windows? A bit.

@@Wistbacka if you think the memory performance of windows 10 is only "a bit" better than previous versions of Windows: you know nothing .

@@fintonmainz7845 win 10 was fine. I would honestly prefer to go back to that. But I was severely disappointed when I recently updated to win 11. Win 11 is worse than win 10. So my solution was to upgrade from 16 to 32 gb RAM. And I did a clean install of win 11, in hopes to remove whatever was clogging my win 10 system. But I did not see any reduction in idle RAM usage, but infact higher than with my win 10. Win 10 also handles custom ICC profiles much better than win 11. Comparing my win 10 to win 7. Cant say if I felt an upgrade or downgrade going from 7 to 10 in terms of speed and mempry performance. Albeit win 7 suffered hard from memory leak issues if you didnt reinstall the OS every npw and then, and that never happened with win 10. God damn the list of "svhost" was long in win 7 after a few years. I also compare all memory performance to OSX. For all this shit and issues with OSX in terms of user friendlyness one cant falter Apple's system optimization. And in that regard windows is far behind. That said, I also know windows can never be as good as they cant do hardware-software optimization to that extent for obvious reasons.

@fintonmainz7845 I believe they may be referring to the graphical feedback on “memory pressure” in MacOS rather than performance.

Not following your question

@@gregbenzphotography you can go into light room and photoshop preferences to improve the performance by not using the cpu but the gpu. You knew this right?

@@akphoto2010 Yes, but I'm not clear what you're suggesting. This video was intended to teach others how to measure performance on their own computer, not as a review of my personal hardware. I've always had my GPU fully enabled in Lightroom in any video I've recorded.

Agreed. I’d love to see multi-threaded code for saving compressed images, always a major bottleneck.

Just run the tests as I showed to see for your workflow and latest LR. These bottlenecks can vary by feature, and therefore different workflows might hit different bottlenecks in the same software.

If PS is warning you about the hardware and the fans are working hard, I'm going to assume the computer is rather old and you may see significant benefit by upgrading to a newer machine. For Photoshop, upgrading the GPU is unlikely to address the concerns you're voicing (especially your comment on the fans). That sounds more like the CPU can't keep up or something else is consuming a lot of resource on the machine.

Make sure GPU is enabled and drivers are up to date. Beyond that, it’s a matter of what you do in PS. A lot of features don’t use the GPU.

That’s the trend, but the same process to test still applies to see how things are now.

Please email me to troubleshoot

With the new Macs, it’s shared memory. For PCs, “dxdiag” probably has that info. www.lifewire.com/how-to-check-vram-5235783

I don’t understand your question

If you had 5X the RAM, it would still likely use the swap. Just part of the memory management of the OS or applications. I believe it’s putting low priority (infrequently accessed data) there to preserve RAM for accessing things more likely to affect perceived performance. Not entirely sure, but can say that it’s far more complicated than you’d expect, lots of tricks to making things feel snappy across a range of computers and scenarios.

@@gregbenzphotography Thank you good sir for the response. After reading Apple's Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor guide, your video, and your response it makes better sense. I do concur with you in that it is for perceived performance and efficiency. Not necessarily being used in so much as there if needed and dumped when needed for another task. Once again thank you for the reply and the video. Your video has done its job and I learned something new.

Absolutely, that’s why I wanted to show how you can test for your own usage. There’s no generic advice that’s optimized for all.

previews too. But agree, would be nice to see gains elsewhere with slowdowns when moving between images and such.

@@gregbenzphotography I would upgrade the ram first.. GPU is only useful if you need to do 3D n if you are OCD to see a few menus are grey out..

Agreed, GPU is less critical for a lot of photography apps at this point