GPU, AMD or Nvidia and suggested models.
Hi.
I'm spending more time taking photos in my side business these days, so I'm spending more and more time in Capture One. My old laptop is not cutting it, so I need to upgrade, I'm looking at just building a desktop to handle Capture One, Topaz labs suite, Affinity photo and Davinci Resolve. With GPU prices so high at the moment, I'm looking at something that will make Capture One run quite well, with out breaking the bank (and I can upgrade in the future if GPU prices ever come back down.) I've read some posts, but in these forums and on Reddit, a lot of posts are more than a few years old and Capture One and GPUs have moved on a lot since then.
I've read that Nvida cards are generally better for creator type applications (video editing, photo editing etc), but with OpenCL that C1 uses, I've also read AMD GPUs can be better. Does anyone have experience with both AMD and Nvidia currently available cards to be able to comment on this? It's hard to find any real comparison on the web, youtube etc. From what I can tell, AMD drivers used to be a bit buggy, but have come a long way and are much better now, so certainly AMD GPUs are an option. Looking at the specs from C1, they sit on the fence for preferred GPUs, but basically faster = better and more VRAM the better, so I'm looking at at least 4GB VRAM, preferably 8GB if I can stretch.
My photography changes through the year from just doing some small projects to just recently I took photos over 5 days at a dance concert. So after culling, editing about 2500 photos for each day of the event and exporting to jpegs with the JpegMini plugin. So just normal home photography my 7 year old quad core i7 (no discreet GPU) is not great, but it is ok, but with editing lots of photos it really is too slow. I've borrowed my daughters laptop we just got her for high school and even though it's it's a thin and light laptop (AMD 5600U with Nvidia MX450), it runs so much faster than mine. For example, it exports about 5-6 times as quick and Topaz labs denoise runs about 20 times quicker.
Thanks in advance
Cheers
David
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Do you want to buy a gfx card only or also update your motherboard and CPU?
When comparing graphic cards, this is the best comparsion I know of, in fact it is the only I know of, but it has been sort of advised by a C1 staff member in the past:
Some background discussion about this benchmark:
The MX450 is not in there, but the MX250 is. I use an older GTX 960 with an relatively new Intel 8core (16 with Hyperthreading) 11th gen CPU, and SSD drives, 32MB RAM, and the speed for C1 is sufficient for me, the GPU only slightly faster then the new CPU.
C1 needs a fast overall system, including the CPU for some of its processes or sub processes, so it is advisable to have balanced system in order to not create a bottleneck with one component being too weak.
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An easy test: Compare harware acceleration enabled vs. disabled on your daughters laptop,
import, preview re-generation, moving sliders, bruhing masks, use luma range, copy a fully developed image settings to other images, exporting images, filtering in a bigger catalog or session, switching between images in the viewer.
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Thanks Beo. I'll check out the links.
At the moment I have 2 options. I've just replaced my daughters desktop with a laptop and turned that into an Unraid NAS. My wife's work may have some old servers they are getting rid of, so option 1 is moving my NAS to the old server (if it's good enough) and then claiming that desktop for my new machine. At the moment it's got a Ryzen 3 3200g with inbuild graphics, 16GB Ram and and a 512GB SSD. So I would just add a graphics card for now, then a bit later get a better CPU and more RAM.
Option 2 is I just start from scratch, so looking at CPU, motherboard etc. Possibly a Ryzen 5 5600X or 7 5800X or one of the new 12th gen Intel chips. Then just build from there, and get a decent GPU, but just not sure which.
Good idea for a test. Once I'm finished this dance photo job this week, I'll have some time and play around with disabling the hardware acceleration and also see if I can disable the mx450 and just have it run off the iGPU and compare.0 -
David,
Much depends on your budget and whether you would prefer a desktop or a laptop (or both!)
Also, if you anticipate undertaking many more large scale shoots like your Dance event in the future, the output performance (and the size of the files your camera produces) may be more significant than the interactive editing performance.
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SFA
I actually really like having everything on a laptop, but I think it's going to be best to split it and have both. I'm an IT person in my other life, so I want a decent desktop so I can run some virtual machines to play around with things.
At the moment I'm looking at doing some more large scale shoots like the dance event (next one is in April), but long term they might be semi regular at the most. I've got a Canon 70D at the moment, so only 20MP files, but at some time in the future I would like to upgrade to something like a Sony A7IV, so 33MP, so I need to have something that can handle the bump in resolution or I can upgrade later to handle that, when I eventually upgrade. Computer comes first, new camera will have to wait a while.
The output performance would be great if it's really quick, but if it's a bit slower then I can export say overnight. At the moment it takes about 12 secs to export a single jpg from my raw files, where on my daughters laptop it's about 2 secs. So much quicker to export a bunch of photos as I'm going, but if I need to leave them overnight, 2500 photos takes about 8-9 hours on my old laptop. Not great, but I can leave it overnight. But if click the wrong recipe, or forgot a setting, then it's another 8-9 hours of re exporting :( If the interactive editing performance is slow, that really slows me down in this case when you quickly go in and bulk adjust for exposure, colour etc, then for each photo straighten, crop and maybe adjust exposure on the odd one. That's what's really slow on my old laptop, if I go to straighten a photo freehand, you drag the mouse, it waits, then it moves, you think, ok, but it may have registered it as 2 moves and it moves again, so you have to wait for it to settle, then ok, crop and it stutters, and then next photo. Even with my daughters laptop, straightening freehand is smooth, and crop is mostly smooth, so it saves me a ton of time if I'm going through a few thousand photos. Roughly I would get through 3-4 times the amount of photos in an hour compared to my old laptop.
Cheers0 -
Thanks, BeO, for sharing the pointer to the benchmark results and the discussion with Christian Grüner.
I would not trust the Compubench results one bit, though. They might be based on very different levels of driver maturity or something else is going on (are they not based on identical CPU configurations, perhaps?). The results simply do not make sense given the known number of CUDA cores, bus bandwidth and memory speed figures, etc. for various NVIDIA models. The respective results are all over the place, rarely corresponding to what one should expect based on the hardware differences.
Now, if those wacky results reflect actual real world performance in C1 then what's not to like, however, I doubt it.
Just a heads up for anyone who might not be familiar with what one should expect from various graphics card models.0 -
Hi,
I would like to see benchmark of Open CL acceleratoin of C1 but for some reason I'm not able to acces it on:Or if there is something more actual ?
I'm trying to find out what graphic card to buy for example is better :GeForce RTX 3050 StormX, 8GB GDDR6 supporting Open CL v.3 or AMD RADEON RX 6650 XT Open CL v. 2.1 ?
Thank you in advance
Kind regards
Lukas0
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