Discussion | Best Value Hardware For Photo AI

Topaz Photo AI General
1

A lot of “what’s the best hardware” topics on VideoAI, but not much on PhotoAI.
Any processing time benchmarks available for PhotoAI. My main use case is NR and a some sharpening. I average about 13 sec per image (20MP Nikon NEF from D500) and a good 30sec per 45MP image (NEF from Nikon D850). I’m using a HP Zbook laptop with NVIDIA RTX A2000 8GB Laptop GPU graphics and i7 (12th gen). I found my son’s desktop (i7 13th gen + 3060) can go about 10sec per image.

Wondering if better graphics cards (AMD or Nvidia) can accelerate this anymore and how much. I’m in the middle of processing about 4000 images from a weekend swim meet. Will take about 18 total hours, but with crashes, and re-opening, it’s taking a little longer.

$ for $, is there any benefit to intel processors to AMD Ryzen? AMD Graphics vs. Nvidia hardware?
My inclination is that Nvidia does AI better overall and Topaz has written most AI code for Nvidia, but I don’t know that for sure. CPU-wise, it may be a toss-up between intel and AMD.

Any insights are very much appreciated!

2

We don’t have exact benchmarks for Photo AI, as processing times can vary depending on the image and hardware used. However, you can refer to the System Requirements to get an idea of the recommended specifications for optimal performance.

As for graphics cards, both AMD and Nvidia GPUs can help accelerate the process, with Nvidia’s GPUs generally being more optimized for AI tasks in many applications, including those from Topaz. While we don’t have specific benchmarks to compare CPU options (Intel vs. AMD Ryzen), you can find user discussions in our forums where others might share their setups and processing times, which could offer helpful insights or maybe some user can share here :slightly_smiling_face:

I operate on a MacOS M2 machine and find the processing times quite acceptable.