I would like to get some advice for the decision for a new PD:
How important is it to have a Geforce or Radeon graphics card? Or is an integrated card like Intel® UHD Grafik P630 in conjuction, with an i9 processor, also sufficient to have a good performance with CDR?
Regards
Rüdiger
Make sure they are NOT USING NVidia chip set graphics cards but are using real NVidia cards.
Thanks! I will look for that! :-)
Are you sure the graphics card has any real impact on CorelDRAW performance?
I understand that something has to, at least, reasonably support a 4K monitor or several these days (say, 1080 + 4K + 1080 here), but I haven't really seen any tangible difference between a NVIDIA GTX series card (so about 4 years old) or, what is currently here, a RTX 2060.
I have been testing this a good deal, enabling the "Use GPU for vector previews" in settings, testing some files with HUGE amounts of vector objects, running some fairly complex macros, etc.
Basically, no difference.
Strangely enough there are places where the older 2018 does things faster than 2020 (at least in Macros). So CorelDRAW's claims of massively improved performance have to be taken with a little grain of salt. Some things in 2020 were, say, twice as fast. But then others were five times faster in 2018.
It depends on what you do and use a laptop that cannot disable the on board card most times will not use the add on card. So poor performance.
A desktop or laptop that only handles simple vectors most likely will not notice a difference, many sticker makers and simple sign designs fit this description. This is a vast amount of CoreoDRAW users.
Now move to a complex vector with 15,000 to 40,000 nodes and the game changes. Also image editing, I work with ASP-C, Full Frame and Medium Format RAW files from 24 to 50 MB. As 16 bit RGB tif files they can easily be 60MB+ files each.
Tuesday I was working on a 32 page brochure, I had a Draw file with 65 of these images in it open and all effects were rendered at 400 DPI. Simultaneously I had 10 more images open in Photo-PAINT and PaintShop Pro open with a few files and the system worked smoothly. Draw and Photo-PAINT worked normally without delays in redraw. The 6GB NVidia is significantly faster then my 4GB card on the system right beside this one.
I also do large donor walls, in excess of 100 feet x 25 feet. Loads of effects, many simple vectors, images and several complex vectors with tens of thousands of nodes. The mock up files can be 10 pages and run up to 2GB. The 6GB NVidia delivers an advantage.
I've been doing this since the early 90's and I've built a bunch of systems. If you're building a system is an extra $100 a big deal? It is if your work is not system stressing. If you work your systems hard in my experiance with improved performance you're going to recover that $100 on the first day.
So the question I always ask was, do I want to limit myself? I always bought better gear, increased and diversified my work. It's not all roses, bigger opportunities mean bigger risk but also bigger paydays.
First of all, Happy Holidays! Second, thanks for such an extended reply.
We mostly deal with pure vector files, so that's where I have noticed very little impact from graphics card power and/or having the Use GPU for vector previews enabled or not.
Like was mentioned, I was looking into ways of improving performance and recently asked my colleagues to send the worst files they have ever had speed wise. For example, one of the files had some 30 objects with about 1000 PowerClipped objects inside each. And despite those objects being just single-colored logos someone had forgotten to weld each logo element (or even better their entire batch, even if it would take forever the first time) and instead those were grouped.
So, in the end we had 5000 separate objects inside each parent object. A total of about 155 000 nodes in each. Having 30 base objects results in about 4 650 000 nodes in the file. Slowdown is real with such a file. Pan the canvas, 5 second wait icon. Zoom in, 5 second wait icon. Enter a PowrClip, wait half a minute. Etc.
Perhaps I am asking too much, but that is a pain to use.
As for image editing, I absolutely agree that more RAM and a batter video card will make life easier 100%.
But this conversation actually gave men an idea on how to ease the pain here a little... Might make a macro which saves the original content as a temp file nearby, then converts the overly detailed PowerClip contents into a small preview bitmap image. That should be MUCH faster to display (and possibly use that GPU power).
Then, when it comes to export, use the macro to bring all the slow vector content back. Will need to test it, but sounds like an interesting thing to try... Thanks for the inspiration!