Mac or PC for PL?

Thank you everyone for this vivid discussion :smile:

I am aware that discrete powerful desktop cpus and gpus are still more performant. I am personally more interested in the comparison from the lower spectrum of the performance range. Ça veut dire, my absolute limit is 1200€ and noise and energy consumption are of high importance to me. So the comparison to the M1/M2 are rather Notebook CPUs with integrated graphics like the Intel NUC for me.

As I understand now, the advantage over such a system of the M1 system is significant, as long as any deep learning calculations like Deep Prime are used.

What is not yet 100% clear to me yet is, if I will be noticing any difference while editing the picture, in fluidity, excluding the export time?

Anyway, as deep learning becomes more and more integrated and I hope that PL will incorporate more functions like automated masking, the M1 might still be worth a consideration.

This was my response earlier, not sure if you noticed it as it was part of a long reply.

I brought up the numbers to illustrate the absolute time being talked about. Not the relative time. 1200 or 2000 images is not fairly represented by “in the hundreds” and images “in the hundreds” are not going to get huge time savings.

Personally, I would say even 40 minutes extra on a single batch is not the end of the world, but then I am not a professional photographer. I do, however, work on IT systems with jobs that take many hours and have developed tools and processes to deal with that, the greatest of which is managing expectations.

What I am very curious about is what type of job requires 2000 images to be turned around in a short time? I’m not trying to make a point with that, I’m just genuinely curious.

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Since you’re not a professional, you don’t need to understand.

Enjoy that you don’t shoot under contract with extremely time sensitive deadlines. There’s nothing wrong with being a hobbiest. It’s so nice to shoot just for the love of it — without any expectations at all.

Use what works for you!

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From a benchmark point of view, Windows PCs go higher up in geekbench browser (single core, multi core).

No matter what benchmarks say, a computer has to fit into an environment (power requirements, acceptable noise levels, interoperability with phones, pads etc.) or not, in which case Non-Apple hardware seems to be the way to go for absolute max power - if you know what to look for.

But then again, the slowest part while customizing an image is still the user :wink:

Load curve while flipping through presets in rapid succession for 60 images in parallel: < 180% on an 8 core iMac 2019 (doing the same thing with 1200 images got CPU up to a peak of 350%. Now, DPL is still rendering images at <180%…)
Bildschirm 2022-10-04 um 15.52.43

Hi,
not to forget that the most Windows PC or Laptops are upgradeable.
So my old IBM W510 Notebook 11 years old, got 2 SSD some years ago. One in the origin HD place, the second in the CD Bay. Same with my also old PC which I can upgrade with a modern PCI MSI 1660 or GTX 30xx graphic card.
My MBAir M1 has to live with the built in hardware.
For me the possibility to upgrade with standard units is a advantage for Windows systems

My opinion

Guenter

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Its always worried me how much Apple prevent repairing of their devices. I understand they may have improved, but gluing parts together so large parts had to be replaced for miner replacements I understand was common and may well still be done. I also have an old laptop, changed to SSD’s improved the Wi-Wi with a card change. I can’t swap the graphics so DeepPrime has to be done when I get home after a final edit on the desk PC. But even now the current version of my laptop can still have this changes AND you don’t have a major job to change the battery, two sliding clips and out it comes and a new one goes in if needed.

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Hi John,

I have been following the project of Framework | Introducing the new and upgraded Framework Laptop and will consider whether this can become a replacement for the W510.

stay tuned

Guenter

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Looking very good

Hey, if you’re happy with your performance, that’s great!

I’ve worked extensively on both platforms & much prefer the performance I’m getting now on my new Windows machines. My desktop is a Ryzen 9 CPU with Nvidia 3090 GPU 64 GB DDR4 RAM with 2 TB PCIE 4.0 M2. My laptop is running 12th Gen 14-core i9 CPU with Nvidia 3070 Ti GPU with 40 GB DDR5 RAM with 3 TB PCIE 4.0 M2 storage.

I don’t know, but from my personal experience, a Windows machine has always performed better in any application I use…I got an Apple M1 Max, top of the line (64 RAM and everything else…) but it cannot compare to my PC, which has a RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5900X (12 core). Exporting with Deep Prime is faster and with 3D it just blows away my M1 laptop. I sometimes use Blender, and GPU rendering is way slower on mac (even though Blender has been optimized and ported to the new ARM architecture).

My PC is my daily driver…it looks average but it performs absolutely great!

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If you want to use a PC with PL I highly recommend that you have a reasonably fast GPU. Something like a GTX1660 or better. That may be difficult in a NUC (I suppose that is some sort of compact PC box with little space.) I believe the M1 mac functions reasonably without an extra GPU.
Else, just buy the one with the OS you feel most comfortable using.

The recently announced Ryzen 8700G will be great for a tiny PhotoLab PC at a good price. Otherwise it’s hard to beat a Mac Mini or Mac Studio if you want both performance and small size and money is no problem.

Aside from the thread being old (what made you revive it?)

really depends on the NUC.

Some RTX… (not a GTX)

Whilst it is an interesting processor, I don’t think the integrated GPU meets the recommended requirements.

I did not notice how old the post was before after answering…
Else, when I did have a GTX 1650/60 in my PC it did work with DeepPrime, not very fast, but quite a bit faster than with CPU only.

I had started this thread, meanwhile I got an Apple Mac mini M2. Am very happy with that choice and can recommend it. I bought an external SSD with a thunderbolt case where I store my pictures on and they load very quickly. Photolab runs very smooth with it (even though I still use PL5, which is not optimized for Apple Silicon I believe).

Unfortunately, as I experienced too many bugs in the PL7 trial, I decided not to move on with Photolab and switched to Lightroom, at least for one year. Even though overall Lightroom has more functionality, in retro perspective there are many things I liked a lot about Photolab, so I hope that future versions will improve again that I can come back. I would like to open another thread soon to discuss those differences.

there was some bugs when they launched PL7 until last update imo, sure there is some improvement to be done and new stuff to be implemented, better than PL5 now again imo, otherwise nothing wrong with using other software. after all… you’re the one doing the work and that’s your workflow.
i think winning team would be DxO working with Serif (AP) and C1 together, combine all of them and Adobe can retired :zipper_mouth_face: but that’s not going to happen. nothing wrong with dreaming!

*** on MAC you can use GPU or Apple neural engine now, which ever work best for you (with M chip).

Thanks for the tip with the gpu or neural engine, will test that.

For the bugs, one thing that annoyed me for example was, that when switching from color to black and white mode (and back), your current profile settings were forgotten and always reset to a neutral profile. As I am often switching between different profiles to compare them, I found this so annoying that already this little thing did not want me to upgrade. This had not been fixed until the end of my trial period, and I’ve been told that dxo has been aware of this problem throughout the beta phase. Out of interest, has this been fixed by now? Those little things that degrade the user experience should be fixed immediately with high priority in my mind and don’t give me much confidence in the program.

About your point of uniting all those competitor programs, I for myself am happy that at least there is so much competition and see it positive that there are different approaches to software. Lightroom is by far not the optimal program, and for me coming originally from Aperture, Lightroom has always been horrible in its user interface. So I think it’s better to get inspired from different ideas, different implementations, and to not only look at Lightroom.

unfortunately not fixed – and (also) still annoying

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Simply unbelievable.

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