Screen refresh is down to the speed at which your computer can work with 7MB
raw photoshop files, rather than the actual refresh rate of your graphics
card. The video card is not the bottleneck - the amount it has to draw has
not changed simply because you are editing bigger files.
What you do need is more memory (so that PhotoShop uses physical memory
rather than virtual (ie on the hard drive) memory), faster scratch disk (so
virtual memory is faster when it simply has to be used) and a faster
processor. This will give better refresh, but will not fix the problem
totally - you may be better off simply accepting the delay in refresh as a
consequence of your using large files.
If you changed one thing, it would be to increase your memory from 512Mb to
1024Mb. Memory doesn't cost much, so you might even try upping the memory
to 2 or 3Gb. Be wary that some Motherboards say they can support 3Gb, but
don't recognize anything over 1Gb, check your actual max available memory by
interrogating the physical mobo itself (via a suitable system benchmarker or
sysInfo app) rather than believing the hype.
I use PhotoShop CS and 3DMax regularly (the two biggest resource hogs going)
and both were much more responsive with the inclusion of a single 50 quid
512Mb memory stick, taking me to 1Gb. The second best upgrade was a very
fast hard drive to use as the PhotoShop scratch disk (I tend to produce
20-40Mb images, easily done for a 10 layer 300dpi color image, as you
probablywell know!). Look at buying a 30-40Mb fast hard drive (the best
ones are usually designed for use on servers - have a look at Western
Digital Raptor drives, a small one should do - 20-40Gig).
My recommendations:
1. try more memory - upgrade to 1Gb. Faster memory is more or less a con
(that's what processor cache memory is for - accessing slow memory without
performance penalties, so faster memory has less of an effect than you
think).... so PC 2700 memory will make no real difference, stick to PC2100,
just buy more of it with the money if you can
2. 40Gig server drive as dedicated Photoshop scratch disk. Don't put
anything else on this disk, don't specify a directory for Photoshop to place
the scratch file (specify the root dir, E:/ or whatever) and delete any tmp
files that PhotoShop sometimes leaves on it every month or so.
S
