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Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

What kind of art are you talking about? I've done much graphic design (yes, paid) and used Photoshop and Illustrator for nearly a decade (though I now use Affinity, as of last year), and I have never been in a situation where I was running out of resources.

Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.

Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?

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"...Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?.."

Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)

Ah I see. Yeah, I don't do any video or CGI.

The two CGI and Animation shops I've worked at have had most of the artists on Linux boxes...

Yes, this is the case in most of all VFX and animation studios. Pretty much everything is done on Linux, usually CentOS. That being said 8GB is a joke. 32GB is minimum and 64GB is what new machines would be ordered with for almost all artist workstations.

Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.

Our artists at work were drowning with 8 GB of RAM. Upgrading them to 16 GB made a substantial difference for them.

Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari.

> Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance

Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.

Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.

I had same issue but at home where my work flow is different. My solution was to use the extension "The great suspender" which sleeps tabs that hasn't been used in a while. Might help you too.

Firefox is even worse. I caught it using 37GB virt the other day on Linux and a pretty significant chunk of RAM too. I don't even have 37GB of physical memory.

"Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari." This is so true. I've recently stopped using Chrome and switched to Safari. Now my 5-year old MacBook Pro runs like butter.

Browsers and web is frankly getting ridiculous. The modern web has a lot going for it but when moving the web forward people seem to completely forget about the efficiency argument. I wonder how much of the worlds power we waste casually like that.

As a developer and a digital artist I am often running multiple VMs, my various development tools and 2-5 Adobe products on top of my 2 browsers and other misc programs. Agreed that for any single piece of digital design software 16gb should be enough (even to a certain extent After Effects). But if I could have a high quality laptop, that runs Adobe software, is Unix-y AND run the whole Adobe suite plus my development tools... (whilst not having to close all my research notes in Firefox)... gee whizz would I throw my money at that.

I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.

I don't think you're an outlier at all. 32GB is the absolute minimum I need to get my work done without disk thrashing. If I spent more time on video than audio I'd want 64GB.

That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.

The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.

Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?

It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.

It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."

To be fair, I think most people's interaction with "graphics arts" is Lightroom, which is a pretty darn slow piece of software. Not the complicated stuff, where they reused code from Photoshop, but the simple stuff like opening the file import dialog.

I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)

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