Ram : 16 / 32 / 64 ??

[TK.]

Hello!

I'm doing my stuff on Photoshop lately and I'm wondering buying a new laptop for my gaming and cartography needs!

My concern is deciding on how much RAM to handle the brute work I might get myself into. The reason I'm wondering this is my recent map I'm working that I had to brake in many parts to be able to work semi-decently due to size and resolution.

Do you think 16G of RAM can handle most stuff besides the really humongous stuff? Or would 32 be quite often needed?

The price difference in my country for those are quite big, with the 32G RAM being 800,00 usd more expensive than 16 and the 64G RAM being almost 1.400,00 usd more expensive...

[Azélor]

For gaming purposes, newest games require about 8gb to play without problem. It could work with less but the performance won't be great. And 8gnb is considering that Windows and other basic services are running at the same time. Unless you do something like playing the Witcher 3 while making a 1gb map in Photoshop, you will never hit the 16gb cap and even then I doupt it will happen.

I think 16gb is actually more than enough depending what you plan to do with it. If you fear it is not enough, make sure the other components of the computer allow you to increase the Ram (mostly the processor). You can always add more ram later.

I really wonder what would be the size limit of a map with a 32gb or 64gb computer.

[J.Edward]

I guess I'll go ahead and say it - you're running a 64 bit OS, right?
32 bit OS only addresses 4GB of ram. I know, you probably already know this. Just making it clear for any others.

Newer OSes consume a fair amount of their own ram. Then if you are also running a browser, sketchup, an image viewer, music or a movie on second monitor....
Maybe rendering some 3d in the background....
[I know, you said a laptop] just giving some examples of stuff to eat up resources.

I run 32 gb and PS has no issues there.
Your graphics processor will play into it. CPU definitely will.
An SSD will make a big difference as well. All of them play together to give you a better experience.
No one component is the magic bullet.

[johnvanvliet]

I use a 5 year old machine with only 8 gig ram
most of the time i do not pass about 6 gig of use
BUT

i have hit the SWAP and it is easy to do

so 16 gig should be more than you will need most of the time

unless you WANT to build a graphics workstation
then 128 gig ram and 2 or 4 xenon CPU's and 4 nvidia cards

[TK.]

@J.Edward - Certainly running 64 ^_^

The other specs are more or less decided and I don't believe them to be bottlenecks:

Processor I7-6700HQ
A Primary storage SSDR PCIE NVME 256GB for OS and speedy things and secondary 500-1T HDD 7200 RPM for storing stuffz
A GPU AMD FIREPRO W5130M 2G DDR5 or a Nvidia® Quadro® M1000M w/2GB GDDR5 for heavy duty

Than the question of the RAM...since I'm going with Dell, one of their workstation specs only support up to 16G and the 7000 series can go up to 64, thus the steep price increase and why i'm wondering about. Clearly a desktop (with higher specs) would go for third the price (or cheaper >.>) but I've been more and more interested in having access to my full power tool wherever I am working from than waiting to return home.

I might be an exception, but people would be amazed how much RAM you can run through when you have Chrome with 20+ tabs open, XnView open with images, music, a game minimized to chat/check whats going AND Photoshop with a 2G map going

[ChickPea]

Must admit, I personally wouldn't consider a laptop for heavy duty graphics work. You'll definitely get more bang for your buck with a desktop PC, but I guess only you can decide if the portability of a laptop is worth the trade-off. I like having a large monitor too, although you can of course connect a separate monitor if you're at home.

My current desktop has 16 gigs of RAM and I almost never go anywhere near its full capacity, but I'm still glad I spent the money. I've come close to using 8gigs and, when I built the PC a couple of years ago, it cost just over £50 to double the RAM from 8 to 16gb so it made sense to go for it. I like being able to have all the apps I want open at the one time without worrying too much about memory. Should mention that I'm using Gimp on Ubuntu, not Photoshop on Windows, so the OS isn't quite the resource hog Windows can occasionally be.

I'd say simply buy as much RAM as you can afford (without spending silly money) as it helps to future-proof your machine, especially when combined with a powerful i7 processor.

[J.Edward]

TK - Yeah, that's a tough choice. I had to make the same one when I was building my current computer.
As it's a desktop I went with more ram but it was nowhere near that price jump either.
In the end only you can answer this. If you use a lot of memory now, and you anticipate increasing use maybe you should go for more.
I couldn't pay that much though... that's why I always build my own desktop.... chained to a desk.

I will say, so far I've only hit around 12-14gb of use but that was a rather intensive day.

[ChickPea]

Ha, only time I've come close to hitting my RAM limit is when Inkscape goes nuts on me. I run the dev version and it's ... temperamental sometimes!

[- Max -]

Your graphics processor will play into it. CPU definitely will.
An SSD will make a big difference as well. All of them play together to give you a better experience.
No one component is the magic bullet.

This. A good CPU and graphic processor associated with a SSD make differences. I'm working with this kind of set up and 16gb is far enough, even if you work on huge PS files.

[waldronate]

As Terje Mathisen once said: "All computing can be viewed as an exercise in caching." Your computer has a hierarchy of memories, with huge differences in speeds between each: on-CPU registers, on-CPU cache, main memory, mass storage (disk or SSD). When one level of memory gets filled up by CPU processing, the CPU has to start fetching things from the next-slower level of memory. Each of these memories has a sweet spot of cost vs. size for your application. Photoshop is pretty good about organizing things to keep them in the fastest available memory, but there are hard limits based on the size of the files that you work on. I recall that the general rule of thumb was that you should have around 2 to 4 times the amount of memory as the size of the largest file that you intend to work on plus some to run the OS (that was advice from years ago but probably still applies). Much memory above that won't help much except to allow you to do other things while you do your work. Much less than that and your system will start swapping to disk. Swapping to disk may mean that you need to find a hobby to occupy you between operations.

8 GB is likely good enough for most uses, and 16 GB would be good enough for most uses except for extremely large data sets (typically high resolution with lots of layers). The initial startup and save times for a file, though, will be entirely dominated by hard disk speed: an SSD will help out a whole lot in that case.

One thing to consider is that huge numbers of pixels often aren't as helpful as you might expect. A map is, after all, an abstraction. It may be better to have a largish map area with smaller maps to show detail areas than to try to make one huge map at extremely high levels of detail.