Well, I’ve struggled with slow processing speeds long enough. I’ve taken action and… wait for it… SUCCESS!!!
I was running Topaz Denoise, Sharpen, and Mask on an HP Pavilion featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 1600 CPU, an AMD Radeon RX 550 GPU, 16 GB RAM, and a std 1TB Hard Drive. I thought it was sufficient, according to the Topaz recommendations. It did work. However, and this is a huge however, it could have been much faster.
I found that I was spending a fair amount of wait time for exporting to and from Topaz (I use Luminar 4 as my main editor) and a ton of rendering time while in Topaz (and Luminar, as well.)
I bit the bullet and got a totally new Cyberpowerpc system to include an AMD Ryzen 7 3700 CPU, and AMD Radeon RX5700 GPU, and 16 GB RAM with a 1TB SSD. Wow… what a difference. So, what’s my point?
Before I made the move, I asked if I should increase RAM, get a better GPU and/or CPU, switch to an SSD. The answer, apparently is, “yes, yes, yes, yes.”
It’s all about bottlenecks. Main editing software, plugin software, and other processes rely on one of the “Big 4.” Maybe on more than one! It took me a while, but now I realize that you need to address all of the potential bottleneck areas to insure a speedy process.
So, here’s the bottom line on speeding up your process… Fast CPU, GPU, storage retrieval, and sufficient RAM. The BIG 4. If you skimp on any of them, you may run into a bottleneck.
