Photoshop CC 2017 NVIDIA Quadro GPU Performance

Introduction

Test Setup

To see how each of the Quadro cards perform in Photoshop, we used the following workstation hardware and software:

This hardware is essentially what we use in our Photoshop Recommended System and should be an excellent platform for our testing. The Quadro cards we are testing are a mix of Maxwell and Pascal based cards, but with the exception of the M6000 they are all the latest cards available at each price point. The M6000 was replaced by the P6000, but we decided to include it as a way to compare the older Maxwell architecture to the newer Pascal architecture. The different video cards we will be testing are:

To benchmark the performance difference between each card we timed how long it took to complete various actions that are supposed to be able to utilize the power of the video card. These actions were applied to a 360MP image (21500×16718) in order to ensure that they took long enough for us to get accurate timing results.

The specific actions we tested are:

• Field Blur
• Iris Blur
• Tilt-Shift Blur
• Smart Sharpen
• Render – Tree
• Lighting Effect
• Camera Raw Filter
• Image Size (Preserve Details)

Benchmark Results

If you take a even a quick look at the charts above, it is obvious that the results are very polarized. Some actions like the various blurs and "Smart Sharpen" show decent performance gains the the different Quadro models. However, others like "Render – Tree" and "Lighting Effect" show a good performance gain from using a discrete GPU, but not much of a reason to get a higher end card.

Interestingly, the "Camera Raw Filter" and "Image Size (Preserve Details)" actions show almost no difference between integrated graphics and any of the GPUs we tested. This means that from a performance standpoint it shouldn't matter what GPU you use for these actions.

Conclusion

Since the performance benefit from the different GPU models changes drastically depending on the specific action, we considered not having an overall average chart in our conclusion. However, since most Photoshop users perform a wide variety of actions throughout the course of their work we decided that it is still a valid way to present our conclusions. Just keep in mind that if there is a specific action that you hate waiting on and want to optimize your system for, this average is not going to be as accurate at looking at the results of just that singular action.

Looking at the average, it is clear that there is a performance advantage to using a higher end Quadro card although the performance gains are fairly small from card to card. Due to the pricing structure of these cards, it means that in most cases spending about twice the amount of money on the GPU will result in about a 5% increase in performance.

If you need to use a Quadro card (likely for the 10-bit display support) and are on a tight budget, we would still advise using at minimum a Quadro M2000 4GB if not the M4000 8GB card. Even if you don't feel that you need the extra performance from one of these cards, the 4-8GB of VRAM can be very useful for your system as a whole. Photoshop itself won't need it unless you work with very large images – like the 360MP image we used in our testing – but it does allow you to comfortably use multiple monitors or a 4K monitor without any problems. If you want to use multiple 4K monitors, however, you definitely should use the M4000 8GB if not the Quadro P5000 16GB to ensure you have enough VRAM and raw power to drive those displays.

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