How to chose "best" graphics card for DxO hardware acceleration (in particular DP XD speed)

Having used both windows and Mac pretty extensively, my rule of thumb is that if the GPU costs more than an MacBook Air M2, buy the MacBook (if you’re purchasing it for DxO alone)

One last thing: because I run everything in a SFF (small form factor) PC, my CPU as well as my GPU are both undervolted, to avoid heat issues and using the lower power draw possible…

:nerd_face:

Thanks, but the chart was not created by me, I just posted the link to it.

@Joaquin
Maybe the best thing to get a 3070 or 3060 card will be to buy a gaming computer with such a card. The one I bought is an Acer Predator 3000 with Intel i7 12th gen, 1TB SSD, the RTX 3060 and 12 GB RAM. When I bought mine they had a it on sale campaign and this is seems to be common when it comes to just stationary gaming computers.

The price was 13 800 SEK which is about 1150 Euro (the ordinary price was around 4000 SEK more or about 333 Euro more). Buying just the cards separately would be 600 or 450 Euro according to your writing above and probably a less favourable option if you still have an old computer you still might consider upgrading.

I can also tell you readers that these strange light effects almost all gaming computers seems to have can be turned off or altered if you want something more calm.

I read someone lifted the fan noise and I can just say my Predator is completely silent even if I put on a processing load of say 30-40 33 MB ARW RAW. I think that load is nothing compared to what modern games with advanced video graphics put on the cards.

@Joaquin Please see here Which graphics card do you use with Photolab? - #23 by BHAYT for some tests that I have run recently.

I have some updates which I will post but I purchased a RTX 3060 yesterday which I might be able to fit today or Thursday and when fitted and tested I will add the details to my post.

I “argued” with myself between an RTX 2060 for about £260 (as fitted to my Grandson’s machine but with a better processor and motherboard on his machine) or an RTX 3060 for £330, which was delivered this morning, in the hope that it might be a little faster!?

@Joaquin If you are interested the RTX 3060 is now fitted to my i7 4790K and the results are posted here Which graphics card do you use with Photolab? - #27 by BHAYT

Dear community,
thanks a lot for all your comments and hints! Bottom line I would conclude

  • a powerful graphics card considerably reduces DP XD processing speed
  • NVIDIA GPU architecture is best for AI and as DP XD is AI based, both goes in sync
  • “the more [GPU power] the merrier”, however RTX 30x0 are widely used in the community, hence appear a good balance of GPU power and price
  • as noone has mentioned considerations about power consumption or noise production, I shouldn’t be too scared about it
    Again: Thanks for this open and instructive discussion on the matter!

Must be nice. I have NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti and it hard crashes my computer with DXO…

I have been looking at installing a new GPU but your post intrigued me.

I currently have a much older and slower GPU, the GTX 1050Ti and (touch wood I do not see BSOD’s (crashes) that mention.

Can I ask which version of the drivers you are using as that may have a bearing. As you may be aware there are ‘Game Ready’ and ‘Studio’…I am using the ‘Studio’ drivers and AFAIK these have always been recommended to creative usages.

Hi,
like Laurence wrote have a look at the drivers.
We have had discussions about Studi drivers here Improved win10/11 drivers from Nvidia, vastly improved processing times in PL - DxO PhotoLab - DxO Forums

Good luck

It looks like the Intel Arc A750 GPU has a price drop in the US to $249. Has anyone tried this out? It’s supposed to have performance equal to the NVIDIA 3060, at least for games.

Ars Technica has an article about this, here.

Hey Laurence and Guenterm,
So you think I could get some better performance out of the GT 1030 card using the studio drivers?
Embarassingly I wouldn’t know where exactly to look for the version of the studio drivers - I watched the video that’s linked but I do not have the “three dots” in the “GeForce Experience” the speaker mentions and shows in the video - see screenshot.
To me only the “Game Ready Drivers” appear available … :worried:
What I have done though is clicking the “optimize” button on the “GeForce Experience” and it tells me it has optimized (which appears to be related to OpenCL use as it says “OpenCL activate” - “on”).

Just a quick search with google shows NVIDIA Studio Driver | 517.40 | Windows 10 64-bit, Windows 11 | NVIDIA

I do not think thst the studio is faster than the gaming, but more stable.

Please check the correct version for your card, amd read the FAQ by nvidia how to install and switch.

Hi Joaquin

I did not noticed that you had a GT1030…drivers aside that is a seriously underpowered GPU. Your CPU on the other hand is AFAIK way better then mine. And yes you are correct that that GPU only has Game Ready drivers!

I have my home built PC from 2010 it is a 1st Gen Intel i5 760 Quad Core, 16GB RAM and now SSD’s for OS and the programs. Over the years I have upgraded my GPU to currently the GTX1050Ti and that was put in so that I could get some uplift using the Topaz AI programs and yes it helped by a factor of x4 in processing speeds.

I am now awaiting the delivery of an RTX 3060 and I will mothball the GTX1050Ti …over the next few months I will be updating my HHDs and plan on new motherboard & CPU in due course. So, the RTX 3060 in part of my upgrade path.

To summarise, I suggest you seek out at the very least a GTX1050Ti or higher and would feel almost 100% sure that you would see improvements in processing times…

As you might have already found out, a 3060/3070 should give you a good balance between cost and performance.
For reference, I do < 9 secs a photo on average using Nvidia 3070 + AMD 5600, which honestly speaking is a middle low tier computer from today standard, but is more than sufficient for my use case processing 33 MP Sony A7IV photos.

I upgraded to an RTX 3050 and have not regretted it. My choice was dictated by the wattage of the power supply in my PC; there were faster cards, but I might have had to upgrade the power supply, and did not want to do that, because it would have meant effectively rebuilding the machine, given the number of leads I would have to remove and then reconnect. It is much faster than the old GTX1050 card. I have yet to find out what PL6 is like on an M2 Mac, though I am hoping it will be as good, if not better.

People are right about a fast SSD being very helpful. I need to store most of my photos on a large HDD, but I tried to work out a system to copy files that are currently being worked on to an SSD, and then sync them back to the HDD. I say tried, because I still haven’t got it tweaked as I would like it to be as there is too much manual syncing involved in the setup. Unlike Lightroom, where you just need the catalogue on a fast SSD, PL6 does like photos themselves to be on one.

I have yet to fit my RTX3060 but in regard to PSU wattage mine is 650W and AFAIK and am aware should have plenty of ‘headroom’. (Motherboard with i5 1st gen @95W, two SSDs, three HDDs, four fans).

I made sure when I built it to allow for excess capacity if for no other reason to avoid stressing the PSU & to allow for expansion and upgrade changes over time :slight_smile:

FWIW this PSU wattage calculator tells me I need 514W
Power Supply Calculator | Cooler Master

@BoxBrownie My system is an i7 4970K with 24GB, 4 HDDs, 2 x SATA SSDs and one NVME connected via a graphics card slot on a PCie card.

The power supply is a Seasonic Platinum and the most power consumption that a power meter has shown (so far) with my new RTX3060, when processing DP XD, is about 330W or thereabouts and the machine idles around 100W with most of the normal graphics routed via the onboard Intel chipset.

With respect to choosing the best graphics card I would suggest that it is a mixture of graphics card AND CPU. The problem is that its is easier to change graphics card than CPU, if I wanted to change CPU then I would need to

  1. Buy a new processor
  2. A board to run it
  3. New memory (DDR3 won’t run on the board I will need DDR4)

That all “just” costs money, then we come to all the software installed!

I should, hopefully be able to clone the Boot SSD (although I initially had trouble moving to the i7-4790K from a previous generation of processor and motherboard) and install the clone into the new machine but every piece of software that uses a machine footprint will need to be re-licensed!

The issue comes down to this, which I have been “banging on” about for weeks, replacing the GTX 1050 with the RTX 3060 has shifted the “problem” with exporting away from the GPU to the CPU.

It hasn’t completely eradicated GPU time for DP exports but the Noise Reduction component (mostly GPU with some CPU to control the process) now accounts for 96 seconds of the time of an export of 109 RAW images I took yesterday which took 595 seconds in total. This took 1181 seconds on an almost identical i7-4790K with a GTX 1050Ti GPU and the NR component was 738 seconds, i.e. 738 seconds for NR down to 96 seconds.

DP XD is a bigger problem with the 1050Ti card the whole export took 3358 seconds and the NR component was a “mere” 2915 seconds. The export time is now 744 seconds and the NR component is 245, and while it is possible that an even more expensive and faster graphics card could reduce that further, the biggest component now is the CPU only element of 499 seconds.

The techpower web site ranks the 1050Ti as 33% compared with the 3060 at 100% but looking at the performance ratios the older card is performing below that ratio I think and PhotoLabs clearly only uses part of the card and only for short periods of time.

The problem is that no-one from DxO comes near the forum @Musashi and we need real guidance to point to what features DP and DP XD actually exploit on the GTX and the RTX and the Radeon cards to better guide our use and purchases, but I won’t hold my breath waiting.

Putting testing etc. to one side we went for a walk along the paths around one of the two adjoining Golf courses that use the Southern slopes of the downs for their fairways yesterday (Sunday)

I then used the 109 pictures I took to run a variety of tests, and these are summarised in the following tables

In the tables I classify the NR element as GPU, but it has to contain an element of CPU to control the GPU elements and consolidate the results into the image etc.

The %age column is the comparison of the GPU (NR) time per image for the 3060 divided by the same figure for the 1050Ti. There may be better ways of expressing this but clearly the improvement for DP is better than the improvement for DP XD on my systems, with my RAW images and my edits, other users may do better or worse than this!

The Google spreadsheet is useful but it is “simply” comparing the overall time to complete the whole job and is actually rolling the CPU usage (governed by the CPU power and the ability of DxPL to use that power productively) together with the GPU usage (governed by the GPU power and the ability of DxPL to use that power productively).

A faster CPU will distort the overall score and may make a slightly slower GPU look better than it actually is.

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I have yet to find out what PL6 is like on an M2 Mac, though I am hoping it will be as good, if not better.

Unfortunately it is quite bad with the base M2 models with small number of GPUs, as the neural engine acceleration is having issue with putting a purple/red cast on photos processed with DPXD.
While using GPU is fine, it is much slower comparing to what the neural engine was offering.
I should also say this happens only on the lastest Mac OS version (13.x Venturna), but Mac OS 12 is fine afaik.

I recently went from a Zotac GTX 1660 Ti to MSI RTX 3070 and have noticed a (HUGE) difference in processing times from my Panasonic G9 raw files. My system is Ryzen 9 5950X, 32G ram, Win 11 and 1T SSD, using DXO Photolab 6.2 and DeepPrime XD either exporting to disk/another application or Nik Effects etc nothing takes longer than 7 or 8 secs. If you can afford a decent graphics card then go for it.

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