Let's talk about video cards...

[Spendlove]

Santa has given me about $100 US to get a video card that will help photoshop run faster.

I've decided to go with Nvidia, since Adobe and Nvidia are pals. (Nvidia GeForce cards are software boosted in photoshop, ATI is left out. My built-in ATI 3200 is painfully slow sometimes although it gets the job done, eventually.)

I've found a couple, and I need some real geeks to help me with this...

A GT240 with 512 MB of GDDR5 (five) memory...
A GT240 with 1024 MB of GDDR3 (three) memory...

I've read that the 512 MB GDDR5 runs faster on gaming apps than the 1024 of GDDR3, but what about giant photoshop files with twenty layers and such? Would memory be more helpful or memory speed? Does the video card even hold on to any of the file data... I don't know the architecture of the PC for this type of stuff to make a good guess.

Any suggestions? (Even other cards up to $150)

[teaking]

Well photoshop will take advantage of dedicated memory on your graphics card and the GPU to some extent especially for textures and rendering. How ever memory speed does come into play also we all know for games the faster you can get data from the GPU to the CPU and on screen the better gameplay.... lets not get into xbox/Ps3 GPU vs multiple core CPU debate lol

So I personaly would go for the faster memory... but others would say its minimal difference for editing and in that case the extra memory will probably be of more use... so if your going to be holding a lot in memory get the card with the most memory.

[garrettth]

for $150 tho you're really only gonna get a so-so card anyways... why not save up a little more cash and really get something worth buying?