Design applications that we use day to day like Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro have evolved exponentially in last few years. It has seen a lot of changes from addition of new innovative features to improvement of pre-existing tools. In short these apps have become marvelous. They provide a complete tool-set to turn your ideas into reality but to be able to utilize their full potential one needs to run them on powerful optimized hardware.
You might have noticed the delay in start up time of apps and the delay when you try to apply an effect and want to see its result. These are many instances when you observe that performance of an app degrades. It becomes very frustrating and conflicts with the creative flow.
Fortunately, you can upgrade your computer’s hardware to improve the performance. However, merely upgrading the RAM won’t work. You also need to upgrade other hardware.
Here is what you need to upgrade and why?
- CPU- Get one with higher number of physical processing cores and higher operating frequency, the greater the numbers the better the performance.
- RAM- Get one with higher operating frequency supported by your CPU. for e..g. an 8GB RAM running at 1600 MHz will perform better than the 8GB RAM running at 1333 MHz.
- HDD- Just don’t get a HDD which is too slow. Upgrade them to an SSD. SSDs are at least 4x faster than the HDDs. You would see a visible performance boost in startup times and overall performance of your apps.
- GPU – Graphical processing units (Graphics Card) are no longer limited to be used for high-end games. GPUs have seen great technological advancements that can be leveraged to boost the performance dramatically in design apps. For e.g. CUDA technology of nvidia graphics card accelerates rendering performance in high-end apps such as after effects, for complex ray-traced 3d renderings. It is also used to speed up the rendering of video in Media Encoder. These days GPUs are a critical part of a setup used for design. It also supports great experience in multi-monitor setup.
- Updated Softwares- Keeping your operating system and all the apps that you use up to date helps in getting the most out of your hardware. Updates released have new features, optimizations and performance improvements for your existing hardware. Sometimes just keeping your softwares updated can save you the cost of buying a new hardware.
