Graphics card a must for Capture one 8?
Hello,
I have recently put together a fairly responsive PC. Nothing spectacular, but meant to run CO1 and photoshop smoothly.
At the same time I have switched to using one large catalogue for all my images. The catalogue (referenced) is on the system disk, a Samsung evo 850 SSD, and the raw files are on a rather slow WD green 2tb HDD. When I work intensively on a collection of images, I export them as a seperate catalogue on a USB3 SSD, and import them back when finished.
All works ok., except for the large main catalogue, containing some 25000 images and containg several albums and smart albums. It takes a long time to load, en is rather unresponsive. My understanding is, that the slow WD green disk containing the raw files should not affect catalogue performance, as I don't do batch processing, and all the adjustments and previews are on the fast SSD. I have been monitoring CO1 in the task manager, and cannot really see where the bottleneck is. I have 16gb RAM, an i5 4590 3.3 ghz processor (no batch processing), and no graphics card (the i5 has onboard HD4600 2gb graphics).
I see CO1 using very little CPU power during the loading of the albums in the catalogue (8-9%), and also during preview generating of newly added images (also 8-9%), both tasks taking a long time. Loading the albums in the catalogue (7 of them at this stage) already takes about 5 minutes, and I hardly dare adding more albums, because with each album (200 images) another minute is added. As soon as I want to load an album, it says "loading images", and in the task manager the amount of RAM in use starts building slowly until around 4gb (at this stage) and then suddenly all the albums are available. Until that stage, the albums all say: "loading images".
I take it that this is intended behavior, but what seems strange, is that CO1 only uses 8-9% of CPU power during these demanding tasks, (loading the catalogue albums and generating previews), making them last a long long time.
Does anyone have more insight in the workings off CO1 8 on windows, and is a graphics card needed to speed things up and make the large catalogue more responsive? I would be considering a 2gb Nvidia quadro K620, as I have a 10 bit eizo coloredge monitor. Or is CO1 just slow at these tasks?
Thanks
Chris
I have recently put together a fairly responsive PC. Nothing spectacular, but meant to run CO1 and photoshop smoothly.
At the same time I have switched to using one large catalogue for all my images. The catalogue (referenced) is on the system disk, a Samsung evo 850 SSD, and the raw files are on a rather slow WD green 2tb HDD. When I work intensively on a collection of images, I export them as a seperate catalogue on a USB3 SSD, and import them back when finished.
All works ok., except for the large main catalogue, containing some 25000 images and containg several albums and smart albums. It takes a long time to load, en is rather unresponsive. My understanding is, that the slow WD green disk containing the raw files should not affect catalogue performance, as I don't do batch processing, and all the adjustments and previews are on the fast SSD. I have been monitoring CO1 in the task manager, and cannot really see where the bottleneck is. I have 16gb RAM, an i5 4590 3.3 ghz processor (no batch processing), and no graphics card (the i5 has onboard HD4600 2gb graphics).
I see CO1 using very little CPU power during the loading of the albums in the catalogue (8-9%), and also during preview generating of newly added images (also 8-9%), both tasks taking a long time. Loading the albums in the catalogue (7 of them at this stage) already takes about 5 minutes, and I hardly dare adding more albums, because with each album (200 images) another minute is added. As soon as I want to load an album, it says "loading images", and in the task manager the amount of RAM in use starts building slowly until around 4gb (at this stage) and then suddenly all the albums are available. Until that stage, the albums all say: "loading images".
I take it that this is intended behavior, but what seems strange, is that CO1 only uses 8-9% of CPU power during these demanding tasks, (loading the catalogue albums and generating previews), making them last a long long time.
Does anyone have more insight in the workings off CO1 8 on windows, and is a graphics card needed to speed things up and make the large catalogue more responsive? I would be considering a 2gb Nvidia quadro K620, as I have a 10 bit eizo coloredge monitor. Or is CO1 just slow at these tasks?
Thanks
Chris
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[quote="ChrisM" wrote:
Does anyone have more insight in the workings off CO1 8 on windows, and is a graphics card needed to speed things up and make the large catalogue more responsive?
Sorry you've had no response in over two weeks of waiting. Hope I can do something to help. I've literally only just taken up C1 and haven't even extended my early testing yet into the area of catalogues. So, just a few generic thoughts (from somebody without a clue about cataloguing)... 😊
Windows '?what?'... You've put the stuff together yourself so I'm assuming you know where to find and what to do when you've got there - with no particular order or significance:
* disc/file fragmentation... eg your files are interleaved to hell and back with edits over the years
* don't bother with CPU in the task manager, it's the disk io and memory usage that's more at issue
* for those areas holding your RAWs remove the OS search/indexing options
* for those areas holding your RAWs remove anti-virus gating (including the OS defender stuff)
* for those areas holding your RAWs are you formatted with NTFS with default sectors (*NOT* FAT32)
* REALLY experiment around with the OS virtual memory (paging) advanced system settings stuff
When I start trying out and, maybe, even using C1's cataloguing I'm probably going to have some problems too. I've well over 100k RAW files sitting on a hardware RAID5 built using those same slow 2TB green WD HDDs. The workstation only has 6GB of DDR3 resident but, yes, I do have a separate graphics card installed. However my take on cataloguing is that it should be more about parsing and database io than actual graphics viewing...
You could experiment with foreground processing priority (close everything else down and only run the stuff holding you up) along with adjusting that advanced systems settings area's task priority setting.
Windows, typically, keeps stuff back for other use... if you know what you're doing you could play with the task priority settings for those processes that you see hard at work in the task manager. Carefully document any changes for suitable reversal should the unthinkable happen... What? Windows/C1 crash {!oh my!}.
To 'replace' any lost search functionality in the OS, as above, I use the wonderful EVERYTHING search utility which directly parses the OS's NTFS File Allocation Table. It's ludicrously fast and utterly brilliant (I have no connection). Maybe C1 should use it for cataloguing;~) Don't suppose that suggestion will go down well at Corporate HQ and, for one, it probably isn't or can't be ported to a MAC.
Hope I've given you some food for thought at least.0 -
[quote="dreckly" wrote:
[quote="ChrisM" wrote:
Does anyone have more insight in the workings off CO1 8 on windows, and is a graphics card needed to speed things up and make the large catalogue more responsive?
Sorry you've had no response in over two weeks of waiting. Hope I can do something to help. I've literally only just taken up C1 and haven't even extended my early testing yet into the area of catalogues. So, just a few generic thoughts (from somebody without a clue about cataloguing)... 😊
Hi Robert, thanks for your response and views/tips.
In the meantime (surprised that there is little discussion on Capture one performance with catalogues), after doubling my RAM from 8gb to 16gb, I went for a Nvidia 750ti based graphics card (the EVGA version, as it is literally the only one with a display port output). It's been a while since I assembled my last PC (went for a mac for a few years), but these 28nm Maxwell graphic cards are no longer the power hungry noise makers that I was used to, luckily! I cannot say that CO1 now runs smoothly with my large catalogue, but it was a good step anyway. Images look better and sharper than with the Eizo display on the internal graphics, and it is simply a good idea to keep graphics processing separate from the CPU bus if you ask me. It's easy to see the increase in processing power when batch outputting images to large files, but that was not really my concern.
I'm on windows 10, and hope that native support for windows 10 will change things for the better, because I cannot understand why CO1 only uses 8-9% of my quad core CPU when it has to generate 200+ previews, thus taking 10+ minutes to do so (and makes no use whatsoever of the graphics card power). The móst questionable thing however, is that preview adaption to the screen when zooming in to 100% takes about 4-5 seconds with the display setting to "auto" in openCL preferences. When I switch off openCL, it takes about 2-3 seconds. How's that? is the DDR5 2GB graphics card almost two times slower in refreshing the image on a 1650px monitor in CO1, than the CPU itself? I guess some things are lost on me.
I will disable search, it is a NTFS drive without much file fragmentation, so that is not holding performance back. Let's wait and see what native windows 10 support will do.
Chris0 -
Briefly ...3am! Probably need to look at your BIOS. Using sessions (no catalogues yet) with a single image in the frame: going from Ctrl-0 (fitted) to Ctrl-Alt-0 (100%) takes less than a second. "handing" around the image invokes much CPU ~60% very briefly before going solid. Hear CPU fan deepen slightly as it gets to work at those higher CPU percentiles. Yes, C1 uses my quad cores. You probably need to go through your BIOS settings and make sure the motherboard is handing off to C1 all that is needed or is feasible. My C1 is set for full hardware support (eg openCL). Am reading up on a lot of old threads in self-education. Seems like we must both await Win 10 official "support" (ho hum)... Suggest read:
http://forum.phaseone.com/En/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=17686&start=0&sid=6bffbddc275767e1e0577c61e9a6dc7c0 -
BTW I'm not getting any forum post notifications ...there may be a delay until I find out what is blocking whom. 0 -
[quote="dreckly" wrote:
BTW I'm not getting any forum post notifications ...there may be a delay until I find out what is blocking whom.
Unfortunately forum post notifications don't work! One day they may fix it, perhaps.
Ian0 -
[quote="dreckly" wrote:
Briefly ...3am! Probably need to look at your BIOS. Using sessions (no catalogues yet) with a single image in the frame: going from Ctrl-0 (fitted) to Ctrl-Alt-0 (100%) takes less than a second. "handing" around the image invokes much CPU ~60% very briefly before going solid. Hear CPU fan deepen slightly as it gets to work at those higher CPU percentiles. Yes, C1 uses my quad cores. You probably need to go through your BIOS settings and make sure the motherboard is handing off to C1 all that is needed or is feasible. My C1 is set for full hardware support (eg openCL). Am reading up on a lot of old threads in self-education. Seems like we must both await Win 10 official "support" (ho hum)... Suggest read:
http://forum.phaseone.com/En/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=17686&start=0&sid=6bffbddc275767e1e0577c61e9a6dc7c
It was the catalogue after all.....
I tested integrity and did the optimization, but still perfomance of this 23000 images catalogue is severly downgraded.
I had not yet seriously used CO1 with a session on this new PC but indeed: ctrl-0 to ctrl-alt-0 in a session takes less than a second, in the catalogue around 4 seconds with openCL enabled and 2-3 sec. with openCL disabled.
I'll next test with smaller catalogues, but I'll likely be changing my workflow and use the large catalogue as little as possible
Chris0 -
[quote="Ian3" wrote:
[quote="dreckly" wrote:
BTW I'm not getting any forum post notifications ...there may be a delay until I find out what is blocking whom.
Unfortunately forum post notifications don't work! One day they may fix it, perhaps.
Ian
That is DEEPLY unimpressive. From a few seconds glance and off the top of my head the forum seems to be built on Open Source software that some years ago I used to know called Phorum v5. Indeed I ran one such on my own server (right here) on behalf of our village's football team until various 'antics' got excessively out of hand. What then is the point of the all the User Control Panel stuff predicated towards notifications! However obviously off-topic. Wow:-|0 -
[quote="ChrisM" wrote:
...but still perfomance of this 23000 images catalogue is severly downgraded.
Another wow:-| I don't see me having much fun with probably five times that volume or even building a Leica library on top of the existing Canon and Panasonic ones. I thought this stuff was aimed at PRO level... Frankly very puzzled indeed.
I will continue with my self-education (with the aim of addressing the mess that the C1 machinery is making of AdobeRGB down to sRGB conversion) without trying to dwell on how badly the C1 machine appears to be *not* fulfilling your own library/catalogue aspirations or needs. Hope you can workaround these issues.
Perhaps a well funded shopping mission may need to be instantiated 😊0
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