CREATIVE WORKS

Creative enterprises, such as making fine magazines, often require a lot of multitasking. The designers and art editors who work on MaximumPC, for example, use image-editing, vectordesign, and page-layout tools they switch between without a thought.

Just flicking through apps is more a test of your RAM than your processing ability, though; it’s setting them to an intensive task and still being able to work in another app that counts. Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps can suck up a lot of hardware resources, with Photoshop using GPUs to accelerate its effects, but the apps come up short when it comes to multithreading on the CPU. We set Lightroom the intensive task of creating smart previews of almost 1,500 raw images imported from an external hard drive, and watched the CPU usage rise and fall, from 100 percent to as little as 20 percent.

Outside Adobe, the natural media painting app Corel Painter is noted for its multithread awareness, but the real devourers of system resources are video editing and 3D rendering. Premiere Pro, part of the Creative Cloud suite, is definitely capable of taking advantage of your additional cores, but the amount of multithreading it does seems to depend on the task. If you do a lot of warp stabilizing, for example, you might be better off with a low-corecount, but screamingly fast, processor.

Many 3D packages can take advantage of your GPU to accelerate their work, but the CPU is still an important factor. For instance, in Blender, an open-source 3D-creation app you can find on Steam, rendering of your final project is a multithreaded process, but the rest of the app isn’t. This goes to underline that while enormous numbers of cores are useful for some tasks, and extremely nice to have for bragging rights, strong singlecore performance is still needed to get the most out of today’s software.