Adobe Photoshop
The world’s leading photo editing and compositing application. Single-core CPU speed dominates daily performance. RAM prevents the scratch disk bottleneck. GPU is secondary for most work.
- What It Is
- Key Hardware Requirements
- People Also Ask
Adobe Photoshop is the industry-standard photo editing, retouching, and compositing application. Most operations run on a single CPU thread, making clock speed the primary performance driver.
Category: Photo Editing | Developer: Adobe | Platform: Windows, macOS
- CPU: Fast single-core speed. Most brush strokes, filters, and adjustments are single-threaded.
- RAM: 32 GB recommended to avoid scratch disk. 64 GB for 100MP+ files.
- GPU: 4–8 GB VRAM. GPU accelerates blur gallery, Liquify, and Neural Filters.
- Storage: NVMe SSD as scratch disk.
What is the scratch disk in Photoshop?
The scratch disk is storage Photoshop uses as virtual memory when it runs out of RAM. Set it to your fastest NVMe SSD.
Does Photoshop need a powerful GPU?
No — Photoshop’s core tools are CPU-driven. A mid-range consumer GPU with 4–8 GB VRAM handles everything. Spend budget on CPU speed and RAM instead.
We build workstations with fast single-core CPUs, 32–64 GB RAM, and NVMe scratch disk.
