I suspect my GPU is the limiting factor in my Windows 11 (always fully updated!) PC. Since the introduction of Intel’s B580 GPU, I have been attempting to determine if that (or something similarly priced) would make a significant difference in my workflow.
I do not play games. I do not do video. I do the usual e-mail and internet strolling. 90+ percent of my usage is in Adobe Lightroom Classic (organization) and Photoshop (editing). Since I do have an Adobe subscription, they are both updated frequently. I also use several Topaz products and Luminar’s NEO as Photoshop filters. I understand they make more use of the GPU than does Photoshop. A similar query will be directed to each of them, too.
I built this system in 2020. My motherboard is an MSI Thunderbolt Z490, which runs an Intel i9 11900K (originally an Intel i5) and has 64 MB DDR4 RAM. To upgrade the CPU I would have to upgrade both the motherboard and the RAM. The boot drive is a 1TB Samsung NVME SSD, the scratch drive is a 500mb Samsung SSD, and there are two other conventional hard drives for mass storage. I recognize that the hard drives are limiting factors, but to replace 12TB of conventional drives with SSDs is outside of my budget. The GPU is a Yeston Radeon 560D with 4MB of GDDR5 VRAM, which was evidently not the best choice at the time but there it is.
Most of the time, speed is not an issue as any PC is faster than I am. However, when I am processing huge files, which happens fairly often, things really start to drag on.
I believe I need a faster GPU with more VRAM (cannot be upgraded on this GPU). I’m trying to find the point at which spending more (or less!) money provides no additional functional benefit. Any recommendations (remembering my budget, please) or explanatory comments will be appreciated.
The GPU selection is often the single most expensive additional item a new user to Topaz products face. The transition to Topaz Studio (3), and the web apps has made some dent in the GPU still image processing (still trying to figure that one out as I don’t have access yet) and much less impact on video processing (from what I gather, also don’t have access to the web apps that processes video, it is more limited than still).
Since you mentioned LR and PS, I assume you are in the still image processing camp. It seems the demographics of the Topaz community does seem to split along the video vs image divide – though some do both of course.
If there the was or will be benchmarking number for a variety of PC/Macs with a variety of CPU/RAM/GPU/VRAM combinations there is a mathematical way to infer what you approximate delta in performance would be for any given model (feature in the software) from where you are starting to a hypothetical machine.
Unfortunately, after two years of asking, for TPAI and TG, and only TVAI getting benchmarking (where admittedly it is more critical), I don’t think we may ever see benchmarking for the image processing programs. Which I think is a shame for the exact situation you are in, and I was/am in. Where do I go from here as far as a GPU? Which one should I pick? What is the cost-benefit curve? When does additional money spent on a GPU card results in diminishing returns.
With the new promise of web apps for image processing, the only logical course of action at this juncture is to take a wait-and-see approach.
Again…if we just had benchmarking in the Topaz Studio Photo and Gigapixel applications, it would just be a math problem to answer your questions with a worst case +/-25% estimate to maybe something a bit closer to the mark. No chance of that, for what I see at the moment.
I was afraid that might have been the case. I am sorry that was the case.
I wish that as a community we had been empowered with more benchmark testing tools so that the informatiion would have been out in the open to make answering your question one of applied mathematicals and statistical regression. Instead of silence.
