graphics card for lightroom or PS

mrfizzed

i am debating a mac purchase and wondering if the guy in the apple store is right in saying that a graphics card in the macbook pro vs the regular macbook without one. i currently have a deall laptop without a graphics card and it seems to be ok. should it help a lot in lightroom and/or photoshop

jfriend

mrfizzed wrote:

i am debating a mac purchase and wondering if the guy in the apple store is right in saying that a graphics card in the macbook pro vs the regular macbook without one. i currently have a deall laptop without a graphics card and it seems to be ok. should it help a lot in lightroom and/or photoshop

Lightroom and Photoshop only need moderate graphics capabilities because they do most of the computing themselves and don't use the graphics card logic much. The graphics chips built into many of the motherboards are fine and you don't need a stand-alone video card. I run both Lightroom and CS3 on a Dell laptop with integrated graphics and they both run quite speedy. CS3 and Lightroom care a lot more about how much RAM you have, your CPU speed and your hard disk speed than they do about video capabilities.

The kinds of things that the fast video cards make a big difference for are some kinds of video and gaming (e.g. complex 3D animation and shading).