Significant performance increase after upgrading computer

DxO PhotoLab
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My old computer with an old Intel i5 (not supporting Win 11) and an old Nvidia card died in the transport to my new flat. It was maybee six years old and started to feel slow with my 36 MP and 33 MP files.

My new computer has Win 11, Intel i7 gen 12 with 1TB SSD disk and Nvidia 3060 Ti graphics card which is good but not by any means top of the line.

To process a picture with my old computer could take as much as 30-40 sek per image as an average and to index 25 000 images to create a Photo Mechanic catalog could take a couple of hours. Now a 24 MP RAW from my A7 III takes 5 sek to process in 100% (no compression) and the same Photo Mechanic Plus catalog is processed in about 15 minutes.

Opening a folder with new RAW files is done in a snap despite using high res previews thanks to the fast SSD-disk which means a lot for the overall performance level. So it seems now that performance demands my 36MP or 33 MP RAW files put on the system is nothing really to care about anymore. Even if I´m retired and in no hurry anymore I still value my time and it looks like I will get a lot more done with this new computer than with my old so I don´t miss my old computer all that much even if computer crashes always cost some efforts to take care of even if you have a good back up taken to rely on. Maybe I should have upgraded years ago in a better planned way but I´m pretty glad I was forced to do it now instead.

So far I have just seen one problem that is relevant to mention here. We have got back the old integration problem between Photo Mechanic Plus 6 and Photolab 5 that I earlier got Cameralabs to fix. There isn´t possible now again to open/transfer more than one file at the time with the Edit-function in PM Plus. I hope Cameralabs can fix this easily. Still it´s possible though to drag and drop a selection of your choise from PM Plus to the filmstrip in Photolab as a work around.

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@sgospodarenko
Svetlana it´s very easy to slowly accept that our software gets slower and slower as the years pass by with our Windows-computers and a lot of that has to do with Windows itselves. We just get used to it!

I don´t really know how it works for you and your developers but a thought I got after my upgrade is that it might be the case that your developers might have computers that are fairly new and in sync with the software generation they just developes and that some users like myself have older computers that struggles quite a lot more to run the new software that has to process heavier and heavier RAW-files as the pixel race continous.

For me it got very obvious that the new processors and graphics cards and not the least that all new computers has superfast SSD-discs that together offers users experiences on a totally different level than the older computer generation, that still relied totally on harddisk technology could.

A new modern much faster computer will really make Photolab 5 shine in a much brighter light than it was able to do before. Photolab just got a new life in my eyes with modern computer performance. I should probably have upgraded earlier. Photo Mechanic though seams to be very much more optimized for speed than Photolab (it uses smaller previews that are sufficient for that software and how it is used) so there I can´t see the same benefits after the initial indexing is done. There the main gain for PM Plus is a much faster indexing procedure but that is not an everyday task like rendering high resolution previews like Photolab does all the time when using it.

I think many more of the users should upgrade if they can afford it. There is a lot to gain especially if you run demanding software as Photolab and Deep Prime. Personally I got really really irritated when Microsoft (and Intel) together anounced that a lot of our i3, i5 and i7-based computers (including my old i5) would not be fit to upgrade to Windows 11 - we are litterally talking about miljons and miljons of computers here world wide but it was in fact that who made me take the step to upgrade and I´m glad I did.

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I have also changed my computer from MacBook Pro 2012 to a MacBook Pro 16" 2021.
The time to process a 62 MPix photo with Deep Prime is 60 times faster.
More, with old MBP, the fans were running at full speed, now it is complete silence.
Amazing and efficient : I don’t ask the question if I will use Deep Prime…

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Amazing! That might be even be a bigger difference than the one I have experienced. I guess a lot of people really ought to consider an upgrade that are sitting today with either old Windows- or Mac-systems.

I wonder how much of the gain is due to much better processors from Intel and Apple or if must is a result of the SSD-disks modern computers use instead of the older and slower harddiscs.

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Performance improvements depend on a lot of things like multithreading, access to drives, use of GPU, memory bandwidth etc. An old SAAB might not run with modern rocket fuel :wink:

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I use the same SSD on M1 and MBP 2012, just changed the case for an USB-C one : it has no real influence on the performance.

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Like platypus posted " a lot of things…".
My 10 year old i7, 32 GB Ram, old graphic cards, and fast SSD’s doesnt have any problems working on my .orf.Raws, but in case of exporting with deep prime settings, or working with Topaz AI functions it feels like an old horse. Ok I’m an old rider too, but sometimes I would like to have more speed for my horse.
So at the moment I work with Topaz at my MBAir M1 with only 8 GB and it’s like sitting on a Race Horse :grinning:

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Well @Guenterm we can exclude RAM as long as 8 GB is enough to handle a couple of images at the time as the default is set to in Photolab, but maybe that could be an issue if one starts to get use of the better multithreading capacities of the newer processors and process more images at the time than the two the present default setting admitted and our old machines managed to handle.

The thing with a new computer almost everything is upgraded when it comes to performance compared to my old maybe six-year-old Acer I replaced or Escaich’s 10-year-old MacBook Pro. USB is aster as well as SATA interfaces if one like to add disks too. The same goes for WIFI that now supports WIFI 6. If I should upgrade the SATA1-disc I now have put in my new cabinet with a SATA3 one I might get close to four times better speed when moving files internally between a disk like that and my SSD. I still have 40 000 images that I have not processed on my old disk.

The new graphics card I guess is important when exporting with Deep Prime or rendering previews both in Photolab and Photo Mechanic Plus even if it doesn´t really put all that much stress on my card. It rarely increases the speed of the fan as it does when people are gaming. Even that is pleasant both for me and Escaisch because that gives us a much quieter and more pleasant working environment than before.

At first I was really pissed that my old Intel i5 machine was not supported by Windows 11 and I still am because I think backward compatibility almost is something sacred but I also think it´s reasonable to upgrade when the benefits are so obvious now for many regardless if you are using an old Mac or an old Windows PC.

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