Hi. I had a look for an answer to this and couldn’t see anything…
I have just settled on using PhotoLab and the Nik collection for my raw editing. I am running them on my laptop which has an 11th gen i7 processor and an nvidia MX350 GPU and is running Windows 11. I am trying to work out how to make the most of the GPU.
FIrst is a basic laptop GPU like this going to help at all or is it not powerful enough?
If it can help, is there an easy answer to the best settings? Do I let Windows decide (default) or should I tell Windows to target all my DxO apps at the MX350 using the settings option? Or does it only matter for PL rather than Nik plug ins?
Finally, are there any settings within the DxO apps that I need to adjust? I’ve checked any box that implies it needs to be checked to take advantage of a GPU.
Grateful for any advice. I’d quite like to be able to get this set up and then not worry about it!
If PL determines that it can make use of your GPU then it will offer it for selection in Preferences;
Like this:
Or, you could use the “Auto” option … and PL will decide for itself.
Just be aware of this note:
For example:
HTH - John M
PS. You should also be sure to be using the latest GPU Drivers - In the case of NVIDIA, one of the more recent versions is specifically optimised for DxO apps…
nice to see/meet you here in the forum.and a lot of fun with DXO/Nik.
There a a lot posts/discussion with GPU/Performance/Settings and if I can remember a lot of people are using NVidia geforce RTX GPU.
You can first look in Edit-Preferences if you GPU is available to select
Like you can see, my old internal graphics and the old Ati Radeon are greyed and not selectable. If yours is selectable the you have the possibilty to choose auto selection or CPU only.
In Nik Collection you can make your own settings e.g Nik SEP
Thanks. Looked again at that peformance page. My MX350 isn’t greyed out but have left at Auto for the moment on the assumption that PL is clever enough to us it if it can help. Seems safer given that further down it says that my CPU might actually be better than my GPU (not sure why I paid extra for it then!).
“I’ve preselected 3 notebooks by Lenovo and HP and would like to know if the gpu’s are fitting the gpu requirements for Topaz Photo AI Here are the GPU’s NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 30xx NVIDIA Quadro® T500 4 GB GDDR6 Integrierte Intel® Iris® Xe Grafik”
and got the following answer
“*The RTX 30 series is your best bet from this list. * The others may work, but are more prone to conflict with our apps”
And since NVIDIA also provides the more stable Studio drivers, I’ll keep looking in that direction.
But in the end, you have to be happy with the performance, and you can let the export of the developed images run unattended while you relax with a glass of wine.
My export times on my old computer are subterranean, but actually that doesn’t bother me at all, but when you see the fast times on my MB Air M1 you really want to replace the old part quickly…
Have fun while working
Guenter
P.S. I’ve just senn that you are using the standard path for Cache and probably at the General Tab also the standard for the database. Maybe is’ts an good idea to move it to another location, perhaps to a second SSD. and don’t forgot to backup the DB and maybe cache
Thanks. I was planning to just let my normal backup processes give me backups of the cache/database. It will never be super critical for me as photography just a hobby in my case.
Or is there a performance benefit to moving them somewhere else?
