It won't be your video card.

My first guess is your processor but how much free space is on the disk
used for swap for PS and is this disk also used for other things?

Cheers,

Wayne

Wayne J. Cosshall
Publisher, The Digital ImageMaker, http://www.dimagemaker.com/
Blog http://www.digitalimagemakerworld.com/
Publisher, Experimental Digital Photography
http://www.experimentaldigitalphotography.com
Personal art site http://www.cosshall.com/



louise wrote:
I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm shooting in RAW.
I am using Capture NX to do intial adjustments to the raw image and then
saving it as a tiff. I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open. And my
computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very very slowly, pictures
are being drawn slowly and changes are previewed....slowly. It is only
slightly better if I close Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough
to be frustrating for any quantity of work.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow and I am
constantly waiting for large files to open and to adjust to changes. I
find the transition from Capture NX to opening the tiff in CS3 to be
extremely slow.

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or whether it is
simply that my graphics card isn't up to the tasks I am now presenting
to it. Here are the specs:

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large seagate hard
drive with plenty of space.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with 128 meg of
memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E Deluxe motherboard.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is the the
video card the main bottleneck? If the video card is the bottleneck, do
I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of ram or do I get a regular PCI card
and not use the AGP slot at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What
specs should I look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the slowness for
another year when I will feel more ready to buy a new computer. But if
not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

TIA

Louise