Question: Nvidia Tesla P4 out-performing P40 on PhotoAI 'Enhance'?

Topaz Photo AI General
1

Wondering if anyone has any idea what why may be causing performance difference between the Tesla P4 and P40 in PhotoAI (Windows 11).

Denoise and Sharpen runs about the same, but Enhance (Gigapixel) takes 3.5X longer on the higher spec P40 than the lower power P4.

My P4 is installed in a Lenovo M920q Tiny (i9-9900ES) while the P40 is on i9-9900K system. Both are Windows 11 systems with same NVidia Grid drivers for Tesla, and same driver for the Intel UHD 630 iGPU.

As a comp, the performance of the Tesla P4 on PhotoAI is quite similar to the RTX 2080Super on i9-13900K system for Denoise, Sharpen and Enhance.

The Tesla P40 on the otherhand is about 3.5x slower processing ‘Enhance’ than both the P4 and 2080Super.

Totally confused if it is something to do with PhotoAI and if there’s a setting I can tweak on P40/Windows/Mobo/Topaz that will help with the P40’s performance?

3

Please send me log files from the P4 and P40 graphics cards. I can check the difference between the two.

Open Topaz Photo AI, go to the menu bar on the top and click the Help > Open Log Folder menu option. Email me all the logs files that you can see in the window that opens.
Log Folder

5

Hi Lingyu,
attached please find a sampling of the logs files.

FYI, I ran the Tesla P40 and GTX 1080Ti on the same desktop motherboard (Gigabyte Aorus Z390 w/i9-9900K), both had roughly the same slow performance when executing ‘Enhance’ in PhotoAI.

Thanks for lokoking into this.

Best regards,
Kee SOng

P4-Lenovo-M920q-i9-9900ES.zip (124 KB)

P40-Desktop-i9-9900K.zip (140 KB)

GTX-1080Ti-Desktop-i9-9900K.zip (68.6 KB)

6

How do you measure that the P4 is computing?

7

I use both the ‘Nvidia-smi.exe dmon’ under Windows’ Command Prompt, and also GPU-z sensor tab to watch the utilization. Task Manager is spotty as it often shows the wrong utilization.

9

Thanks for sending the files over. It looks like the P4 is using NVIDIA specific model files which are optimized for this graphics card.

From the logs, it looks like we don’t have those NVIDIA optimized model files for the P40. I’m not sure why, but the P4 could have features that the P40 does not support.

I asked my team for more detail about this.

11

Lingyu, just discovered the reason the P4 is outperforming the P40 and by a crazy 3.5X … I am running the older PhotoAI ver 1.1.5 on the Lenovo M920q.

When I upgrade to ver 1.3.8, the Tesla P4 card runs like a normal (5X slower) like what the P4 is expected to perform against the 1080Ti and P40.

When I reinstall the older ver 1.1.5, it again performs way 5X above spec like a RTX2080 Super. Did test the GTX 1080Ti and the sample image enhances in 0:28min, upgrade to ver 1.3.11, Enhance takes
1:36min, 3X slower.

So looks like the newer versions of PhotoAI are getting significantly slower.

PhotoAI-1-1-5.tzlog (174.4 KB)
PhotoAI-1-3-11.tzlog (122.1 KB)

13

At some point we disabled the TensorRT models for non NVIDIA RTX graphics cards which led to the slower processing.

We will be reverting this change in the next AI Engine update which will be in a month so that the performance is faster on all three graphics cards.

Ideally this increases the speed without causing stability issues.

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