Photoshop CC 2017.1.1 CPU Comparison: Skylake-X, Kaby Lake-X, Broadwell-E, Kaby Lake, Ryzen 7

Introduction

Photoshop is an application that tends to favor lower core count CPUs that run at a higher operating frequency, so the new CPUs from both AMD (Ryzen 7) and Intel (Skylake-X) with six or more cores are not really all that interesting for pure Photoshop users. However, there are a lot of people that utilize Photoshop as a secondary application in their workflow so we decided to take the time to see how these CPUs actually perform in Photoshop.

In addition to the Skylake-X CPUs, Intel has also launched the Kaby Lake-X Core i7 7740X and the Core i5 7640X. These CPUs are essentially the same as the existing Core i7 7700K and Core i5 7600K, only moved onto the X299 platform. These CPUs drop support for onboard graphics, but they do sport a small increase in frequency and support faster RAM. Because of this, we are very interested to see if there is a noticeable performance gain to using the i7 7740X over the current leader in Photoshop performance: the Intel Core i7 7700K Quad Core.

To see how these new CPUs compare, we tested how long it took to complete a wide range of tasks in Photoshop including:

1. Launching Photoshop
2. Opening/Saving large .PSD files
3. Convert to CMYK/RGB
4. Applying Blurs
5. Noise Reduction
6. Camera RAW Filter
7. Resizing images
8. Creating Panorama image
9. Creating HDR image
10. More – see full list in the Benchmark Results section

If you would like to skip over our test setup and individual benchmarks, feel free to jump right to the conclusion section.

Test Setup

Since the new processors include two different CPU architectures, our testing platform is less straightforward than normal. Most of the new CPUs support DDR4-2666 RAM, although the Intel Core i7 7740X (Kaby Lake-X) CPU only supports four sticks of RAM rather than eight. In addition, the Intel Core i7 7800X (Skylake-X) only supports DDR4-2400 RAM for some odd reason. We opted to test with the highest officially supported RAM configuration for each CPU, so components used in our X299 test platform requires an entire table just for itself:

To act as a comparison to the new CPUs, we will also be testing AMD's Ryzen 7 1700X/1800X CPUs as well as the Intel Core i7 7700K (Kaby Lake) and Intel Core i7 6850K/6900K/6950X (Broadwell-E) CPUs. Again, we will be testing with the best officially supported RAM configuration for each CPU.

Inconsistent RAM aside, one thing we do want to point out is how much more affordable the Skylake-X CPUs are compared to the previous generation Broadwell-E CPUs. Where a six core CPU from Intel used to cost over $600, you can now purchase an eight core CPU for roughly the same cost. In fact, the i7 7800X is even a hair less expensive than AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs. This means that regardless of any performance gains we may see, Skylake-X is at the very least a big deal in terms of cost.

The images we used in our testing (and their source) are:

Benchmark Results

Due to the sheer number of actions we tested and the fact that the performance differences were remarkably consistent, we are going to forego our typical action-by-action breakdown. Feel free to analyze the individual results below in more detail if you wish, but due to the consistency of the results, we encourage you to skip straight to our conclusion for our benchmark analysis.

Scroll right for more results –>

Conclusion

To analyze the results, we first normalizing them to the Core i7 6850K 6 core CPU, then averaged the results based on whether the task was for HDR creation, Photomerge, or if it was just a general Photoshop action. We could have normalized to any of our test CPUs, but we chose the Core i7 6850K largely because this is what we used in our Premiere Pro and Lightroom testing. This will make it much easier to compare results across each article for those that want to compare across multiple software packages.

Looking at the final results, there are not too many surprises to be found. For the Skylake-X 6-10 core CPUs, if you simply compare the new CPUs to the ones from the previous generation that have similar core counts, the new CPUs are not all that exciting. They are certainly more affordable, but the 8 and 10 core are only slightly faster than the previous generation and the Core i7 7800X 6 core was actually a bit slower than the i7 6850K.

The Core i7 7820X and 7900X may be relevant for video editors that utilize Photoshop in a secondary role, but for pure Photoshop users the only interesting new CPU is the Core i7 7740X 4 core. Before today, the Intel Core i7 7700K has been our primary recommendation for Photoshop users since it gives a great balance of performance across most tasks, but the new i7 7740X is about 6-10% faster than the i7 7700K at the exact same CPU price point. You will end up spending a bit more money on the system overall since X299 motherboards are more expensive than Z270 boards, but the cost difference for boards with similar features is usually only about $60-100. So for a relatively modest increase in price, you get a fairly decent 6-10% gain in performance. That may not be enough of a difference to prompt a system upgrade if you are already using a Core i7 7700K, but if you have a system that is more than a few years old you are likely looking at a pretty significant increase in performance with the Core i7 7740X.

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