Very slow navigation from one image to another
Hello. I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the issue that I'm about to describe.
Prior to posting here I've searched for similar posts and I only found one from 2019 on dpreview with no solution. Here's the link to that one: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/62778883
Summary:
This issue looks as if Capture One is only caching or storing the preview for the 2 most recently viewed images and nothing else.
Whenever I navigate in any folder of any catalog, each image is displayed pixelated for a few seconds before the real image is shown.
[Edit]: I've just tried this on my 1080p display and the images are displayed pixelated for way less time, less than 1/3 of the duration that it takes on the 4k display
Short overview of system:
I'm using Windows 10 on a SSD. Images and catalog are stored on HDD. I can edit 4k video from the HDD so it's not a bottleneck or anything.
As for hardware, the system has 24GB DDR4, the CPU is an i5-10600K@4.10GHz and the graphics card is a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
The main display is 4k and I also have a secondary 1080p one.
I'm working with various image sizes, ranging from 12.3 to 24.3 megapixels NEF (Nikon Raw) files, sometimes also with 12MP GPR files (GoPro Raw images)
What I tried:
1. Using "Regenerate Previews".
2. Verified that the previews are actually generated in the Catalog_folder\Cache\Previews\...
3. Modifying the "Preview Size" to various settings, including the native 3840px of the display.
4. Enabling/Disabling OpenCL for Display. Currently I have it set to "Auto" for Display and "Never" for Processing.
Detailed description
What I'm doing:
I open any catalog with any number of images in it, from under 100 to over 2000.
I go to any folder in the catalog and start browsing through the images using either the arrow keys on the keyboard or the mouse.
The issue:
When clicking on the image, first I see a very pixelated version (as if the thumbnail is stretched to fit the view area). Let's call this image A.
Then, after about 2 seconds the actual image appears.
Now I navigate to the next image and the same thing happens. First I see a pixelated version and after 2 seconds the actual image is shown. Let's call this image B.
If I go back and forth between A and B, they are displayed instantly in their full size. However, as soon as I navigate to a third image, the pixelated version appears and I have to wait another 2 seconds. Let's call this third one image C
Now if I go back and forth between this image C and the one I was previously viewing, all is good, no pixels. However, as soon as I go to another image, there's the pixelated version again.
So considering the above, the short version would be:
A: pixels then OK.
B: pixels then OK.
A < > B: OK.
C: pixels then OK.
B < > C: OK.
A: pixels then OK
Any other image: pixels then OK
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I am experiencing a similar problem. I use .NEF files and besides images taking a few seconds to load,ll the sliders are also not reflecting the changes smoothly. I mean, when dropping the highlight for example, the changes are not smooth and jittery.
I have an i9 processor MacBook Pro and 32GB of RAM and I even close all the other apps to be safe/faster but I am still experiencing the same laggy performance. I made a few changes in Preferences but no luck. I see the last comment was 3 months ago, hoping someone figured this?
Thanks
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Are you guys serious about maintaining this 'professional' software? Whey are you not fixing this three year old issue? Performance is appalling if you have to choose the best among several images, as we all do, and you have to look at a pixelated image for 2-3 seconds before it loads. Capture One takes ages to 'generate previews'. What are previews for? Are you not using them? Are you just caching two previews??
Your solution to this problem has been the 'Cull' window which allows no adjustments, and has no undo function. It's unusable for anything but a first cull of straightforward, well-lit images. If you need adjustments to know which image is really better, as in the later stages of a workflow, it's useless.
At this stage it's faster to make a collection, start a Capture One Live sharing session, open a browser *on my computer* and flick through and rate the images in the browser. It's instant. Because of course it is, it's going through small JPEG images. Really what the F are you doing?
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@Pavlos I am not sure I would have put it in the same colourful as you :) but this is very much my thoughts as well. This is absolutely ridiculous. If it was not so tedious to switch to another software I would be back to Lightroom already. I will probably switch eventually if this does not get fix soon.
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After some digging, it's a hardware acceleration problem. On my laptop I have to open a utility called nVidia Control Panel and manually associate CaptureOne with the good GPU. Otherwise it defaults to the puny integrated GPU. Also setting hardware acceleration to 'Never' in the preferences seems to more reliably make CaptureOne *use* acceleration. Yes, really. Or maybe that option does nothing. Hardware acceleration is just super fragile with CaptureOne, at least on laptops. If you rub it the wrong way it silently breaks and you're back to slow mode. Meanwhile Lightroom (the new version) perfectly happily opens your raw files, no import, no making previews, no nothing. Just point it at the folders and browse. Back, forward, full screen, no problem. And CaptureOne obviously can do it in the Cull window. So frustrating!
Again having spent a whole night trying to figure this out, Capture One seems to use three levels of resolution: The thumbnail which is the pixelated image you see first, the 'preview' or proxy image, and the full size image. If you set the preview to a lower res you can clearly see the three steps. But, this 'preview' isn't a quick to load JPEG. it seems to be a proxy file for the 16-bit image. The problem is it's still relatively slow to load this proxy and apply the settings, during which time you get the pixelated thumbnail. If you make the proxy/preview very small like 720px it still takes a couple of seconds, only slightly faster than the full res. It seems the folks at CaptureOne have mixed up two use cases: Doing quick edits, for which you need 16-bit proxy files, and viewing images for which JPEG with applied edits would work better (what the thumbnail seems to do). They went for proxies, I'm not sure if that helps or why I would want to edit while my RAW disk is offline, and because of this choice the navigation is slow.
With the GPU issue fixed, it still takes a couple of seconds to load a completely new image. But once you do, because there's enough RAM on the good GPU, you can browse back and forth fast. It caches an adequate number of images rather than the infuriating 2 images that I experienced and other people complain about. It helps to use the nVidia utility to take other apps (notably Chrome, Edge, etc.) off the good GPU and onto the integrated one so they don't interfere.
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Have you set hardware acceleration to 'Never' in the preferences and then looked at the CPU utilization? My experience (until 15.2 which I use) has always been that this setting actually works and C1 disregards the GPU, and is using the CPU instead. It is not impossible that the specific task to load and show previews is faster when bypassing the GPU. Which could also depend on the NVidia driver version.
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Wow, 3 years later and this issue still exists.
I have switched to LR Classic in the meantime and for now it suits my needs better due to their AI denoise and fast navigation.
On the Library previews I'm seeing some Jpeg artifacts only on my Rec.709 display and only in very demanding areas (night time sky gradients), due to color space difference I guess, but that's fine for my needs because navigation is instant.
I did also upgrade to windows 11 and the issue remains.
I didn't update C1 in a while though to test it, but seeing that the issue is still being reported I'm not sure if it's worth the time and money.
I'd love for C1 to fix the navigation issue and introduce some next-level denoising, I'd probably switch back to C1 if that would be the case.
Either way, they're both great pieces of software and they both have their quirks.
For example a quirk in LrC is that the highlights and shadows (and a few other) adjustments are content-aware, meaning you can't apply them to a series of 100 photos and expect the same results if the content changes a bit, like for timelapses.
However LrC also has non-aware Shadows and Highlights under the "Tone Curve" section, and these are suitable for timelapses.
Thanks everyone for keeping the thread alive even after 3 years, maybe the C1 team will finally look into resolving these issues1 -
While version 16.4.2.1 shows some improvement, it still falls short of being satisfactory. The experience should be seamless, as it is with other software, even on hardware much less powerful than my MacBook Pro M1. Image switching should be instantaneous, but it isn’t. There’s still a noticeable delay, even when toggling between just two images. This occurs regardless of the resolution or caching strategy I select in the image preferences tab. Although the delay might seem trivial—around 300 milliseconds—it remains frustrating, particularly because it’s technically possible to achieve faster, unnoticeable performance.
Video showing how this looks on my Macbook can be seen here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqSQpyLTuPhqKF-tLJ4QRygVDMxlkRWk/view?usp=sharing
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BeO I'm not sure the 'use acceleration' (Display) option is being honored. It certainly doesn't take effect immediately when you close the dialog. it may take effect when you close and open CaptureOne, but I'm not sure.
More likely there are different things that could be using the GPU or not. Here the issue seems to be not so much processing speed but caching too few preview/proxy files, so that if you want to page between 5-6 images to pick the best you're always treated to the very slow 2-4 second loading time looking at the pixelated image. That seems to be a GPU memory issue. You'd think that with acceleration 'Never' maybe the load and display time would be longer but caching would be no issue, it would be using system RAM. But in fact, the caching only 2 images problem happens even with acceleration off.
I'm guessing GPU memory is the important variable. The built in GPU (something called Intel UHD Graphics on my laptop) gets picked by default. That results in caching only ~2 images making performance unbearable regardless if acceleration is on or off.
If you use the nVidia Control Panel utility to force Capture One to use the good GPU (T1200 on my laptop) that results in caching ten or more images so you can do your back and forth comparisons at perfectly good speed. Loading a completely new image further down in the shoot still takes 2+ seconds, maybe it's marginally faster, but it's the caching, probably by having enough GPU RAM, that solves the issue.
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SFA Using CaptureOne 16.4.1 on a fairly new HP laptop with Windows 10. The good GPU is nVidia T1200, driver updated in the last month.
Darius Mihai I was surprised with what Adobe has done to Lightroom. The new one looks elegant, but irks me in several ways: UI bindings, too much steering to cloud and AI, generally lacking depth. The main thing I like is, if you ignore the cloud nonsense, it just deals with your raw files on disk super fast.
The old Lightroom is still there but looks positively baroque now.
Reasons to prefer CaptureOne:
- Way better UI aesthetics, configurability, key bindings
- Direct editing (can't do without now)
- Image quality, esp. color accuracy
- Great feeling of control, both in terms of UI and the final result
- Even though CaptureOne is very buggy, you restart it and it recovers. I haven't lost data yet due to C1 (I have with LR).If I was gonna give more cool headed feedback to the CaptureOne folks it's this: You're probably designing for a studio use case where the files are enormous, the photos come in near perfect, and the hardware is a desktop with top specs of everything. I'm working with events, on a laptop, the source images are more like 'catch of the day' and need a lot more adjustment just to get to the picks stage, and for that use case your design choices and your reliability are less good.
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And what do you know: If you DISABLE the integrated Intel GPU on your laptop CaptureOne correctly picks the good GPU and it runs fast. Sure, loading is not instant but it's as you might expect and paging between images is reasonably efficient. Amazing! Performance goes from insultingly awful to quite good for a laptop.
By disabling the GPU I mean go into Device Manager, Display Adapters, find the integrated GPU (something like Intel Integrated Graphics) and disable it. Obviously this is for laptops that have two GPUs, an Intel integrated and a more powerful one from nVidia or AMD
Warning: Some laptops don't work if you do this. On my Dell laptop disabling the integrated GPU makes it impossible to display anything because the screen and the HDMI are wired to the integrated GPU. On an HP Z Book disabling the integrated GPU doesn't cause any issues.
You shouldn't have to do this to get CaptureOne to work, but it looks like the code for getting GPU resources in CaptureOne is really fragile, or they test only on desktops with one powerful GPU. I don't know. I found the preference for turning acceleration on/off unreliable, there's no 'on', only 'auto', and once in Auto there's no reliable way to pick the good GPU. Maybe the preference should straightforwardly be something like:
- CPU
- Intel Integrated Graphics
- nVidia T1200 GPUOr whatever you system has. Then we can finally have reliable acceleration.
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Pavlos Papageorgiou interesting points on the hardware acceleration setting being unreliable.
SFA seems to confirm this
Artur Zielazny thanks for the update about version 16.4.2.1.
So it would seem that this mess could be resolved if C1 updates their implementation of hardware acceleration.
I am not really optimistic about this though, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised by them.
Pavlos Papageorgiou Also by the way, I was talking about Lightroom Classic. I don't use the current "Lightroom" which is indeed mostly centered on cloud and remote stuff.
Call me old school, but I'd rather have my files locally on 2 NAS devices than relying on the cloud - a.k.a someone else's computer - to store them.
When I'm on the go, away from where the NAS devices are, I rely on external samsung SSDs.
I've been using the T5 512gb and 1tb, the T7 Shield 2tb, and a Samsung PM9A1 1tb running in an Asus Rog Strix Arion enclosure. The latter is just a 980Pro targeted at OEMs.
Anyway, I'm mentioning these because I've tried C1 on all of them, plus an internal Samsung 980Pro 2Tb. Of course, C1's performance on navigation is the same, while at the same time I'm editing 4k video at 24fps and 60fps off of these drives. This is just an extra confirmation that storage speed is not the issue at all when it comes to C1 navigation.
Thanks again everyone for contributing to this thread!0 -
SFA I'm curious as to why are you putting "tested" in quote marks? Also why are you saying that the storage transfer speeds will not match the tested speeds for the devices?
Are you referring to the speeds stated on the box of the device when you purchase it? Yeah those are max speeds anyway.
However once one can run Atto Disk Benchmark sequential and random, with various file sizes, and another 20-30 transfers in various configurations to get a pretty good baseline on how said storage should perform in various scenarios.
There's also the more direct way by comparing LR Classic and C1 using the same files in the same location.0 -
I had some free time so I tried the following:
Enabled Hardware Acceleration in CaptureOne for both Display and Processing.
Navigation still slow. I checked in Task Manager on the Performance tab and I see a lot of activity for the built-in Intel GPU and only a little for the nVidia GPU.
Then I went in Windows to System -> Settings -> Display -> Graphics and I checked that C1 is set to High Performance. It was already checked.
Navigation is still slow, and still only the last 2 viewed images are cached, all others start very blurred/blocky and only after about 1 second the actual photo is displayed.
However it seems that when I'm navigating there is some work done by the nVidia GPU, goes to about 20% very briefly then back to 1%. At the same time the CPU spikes to 100%, also briefly.
Here are some charts of the CPU and a very small GPU chart at the bottom. I navigated to an image (first spike), then i paused, then I navigated through a few more images.
What I find strange is that both GPUs have spikes at the same time when navigating. Is C1 doing the same work on both GPUs or what's going on here? Maybe one for display and one for processing?
CaptureOne 23 version 16.2.6
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Try checking the box to NOT use optimizations for games. In the past I saw lots of posts stating to not use games drivers so perhaps this games setting also is related to performance?
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Walter Rowe you mean this setting in windows?
I was a bit optimistic but I'm still looking at pixels for about 1 second or even more. For example:
Thanks for trying to help.
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Darius Mihai yes! Thank you for replicating this. This is exactly what I've been experiencing. Capture One apparently using a mix of the two GPUs and only caching ~2 images making the performance of choosing between images unbearably slow.
I solved this problem (briefly) by disabling the Intel GPU, so my laptop now thinks it's got one GPU, an nVidia T1200. Good performance came, but later it reverted to bad performance with just 2-3 images available fast.
So I uninstalled Capture One (all versions) and reinstalled it (16.4.1.2127). Great performance! Capture One happily browses between images, back and forth, as much as you like. Images load either instantly or they're blurry for about half a second, instead of being grossly pixelated for 2-5 seconds before. It seems Capture One checks the GPU type on installation and if it sees the just the one GPU, it then works reliably.
AAAAGH! AAAGH! Capture One people! Why did I have to suffer terrible performance for years because of bad GPU detection code? How many other customers on these dual GPU laptops have the same problem, and just bear with it cursing every day? Please please please get a dual GPU laptop with an Intel embedded and an nVidia and fix this bug, or at least make GPU selection explicit in the options.
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To be fair Capture One is using the Windows graphics interface so blame Windows for confusing Capture One.
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Capture One Right! What seems to kill the nVidia acceleration is using an AI mask. After making sure the only available GPU on my laptop is the nVidia one and that Capture One is using it I had great performance. For about an hour. Then I used an AI mask (Tools -> Adjust -> Layers & Masks -> AI). The mask worked correctly. but after creating the Ai mask, back to lousy image navigation performance.
Close and reopen Capture One, great performance once again.
Does the AI mask, which is presumably GPU intensive, lock up the GPU memory and make it unavailable?
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Walter Rowe they're using an API called OpenCL which allows heavy processing tasks to run on a GPU regardless if it's NVidia or AMD. OpenCL has notoriously bad support in the industry, because the AI people and anyone outside 'consumer' apps uses another API called CUDA that's exclusive to NVidia. It's very possible that all this bad GPU allocation is an OpenCL problem, not something Capture One control directly.
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Pavlos Papageorgiou .. is there a way for Capture One (the app) to aid the user and support staff to recognize this configuration? wondering what info we might be able to pass along to Capture One developers to improve the situation.
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Well, how the turntables...
With the current Adobe debacle I guess I'll invest some time in figuring out this issue or learning to accept it until it's fixed.
I guess I'll replace the LrC AI denoise with Topaz or something, even though Topaz is not as good as the LrC AI denoise, at least in my use cases. I'll probably spend some time looking into alternatives.
If anyone has any other input regarding possible ways to fix the performance issue, please post them here.0 -
Another observation: Disconnecting the external SSD where my raw files live makes Capture One reliably fast to advance to the next image except some images never upscale. Out of 100 or so images in a folder, all shot the same day, most upscale within a fraction of a second but some are stuck indefinitely with the pixelated image.
That gives us some clue as to what's happening. Maybe the generation of previews isn't reliable. Some get generated and some not, so then (with the raw files available) some images upscale quickly and others upscale slowly as the raw file is read and processed. I can't tell any particular pattern. Maybe it's images I previously interacted with, maybe it's random.
I would have thought that if you lave the app alone all previews will be generated eventually. But it seems not.
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This indicates the preview size may not be optimal and it is regenerating previews with each advance. To prove it select all images in the folder, right-click, and regenerate previews. LET IT FINISH. Once finished does it now advance more smoothly? If not, the previews may not be the optimum size for your display. Go in the app prefs and choose a different preview size, regen previews, and try again. Larger previews consume more space of course.
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What are you guys running? LR is a constant bugfest. Capture One has ran smoothly thru the biggest files. I have my catalogs on everything from a 10 year old HDDs to the latest SSDs. Do you have a gigantic catalogue? LR is not bad with SSDs but the older drives, I wait a few seconds for each image to render if it does. I can't believe this is the same software you're having issues with.
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@Michael Jandavs I"m on multiple Samsung T7 SSDs and also a nvme one. It's not the drives, I've tested the transfer speeds multiple times.
The issue is noticeable when using 4K displays.
On 1080 it's mostly ok.@Walter Rowe I tried that too, same issue.
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Asus ProArt 32”. 4K monitor on my end.
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