OWC 128GB Memory Kit: Photoshop CC Filters

2014-03-27 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: filters, GPU, Mac Pro, Macs, memory, Other World Computing, Photoshop, post processing, video tech

Get Mac Pro at B&H Photo. See also MPG’s computer gear wishlist as well as diglloyd-recommended performance packages for Mac Pro.

There are really two points of interest in considering whether installing 128GB is preferential to 64GB:

• Does the slower memory speed of the 128GB memory kit significantly degrade performance for those tasks not involving large memory requirements?
• Does the 128GB option substantially improve performance for really big jobs?

These questions are addressed here with Photoshop performance metrics run on the 3.5 GHz 6-core Mac Pro with D500 GPUs.

Photoshop CC filters

Note that specific Photoshop minor version and system version numbers produce different test results in early 2014 due to short term changes in the code forced by graphics driver bugs. Hence these numbers cannot be compared to other results with slightly different version of Photoshop or OS X.

These filters vary widely in CPU and GPU usage as well as in relative CPU vs memory access behavior. Hence they are useful in evaluating the range of performance between the two memory configurations, especially when combined with the diglloyd Benchmark results.

Overall, the performance penalty for the 128GB kit ranges from 0.2% to 3.4%—a negligible and not even noticeable difference.

The most impacted is the Sharpen filter suite, with an 8.2% penalty. But when GPU sharpening support is restored performance will be 3X to 4X faster, making the differential a moot point in real time terms.

64GB vs 128GB memory: Photoshop CC filter performance