Building fastest possible stacking workstation
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VideoMacro
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 05.08.2020 19:48
Building fastest possible stacking workstation
I am currently building a new workstation and want to know what hardware I should purchase for fastest possible stacking. Would helicon focus take advantage of a dual Titan rtx setup with a 64 core threadripper? Would I need to run multiple instances of the software to utilize all system resources? Is there a bottleneck I should be mindful of? Thanks for the info!
Re: Building fastest possible stacking workstation
We don't support dual graphics cards and that won't change in the foreseeable future, so one Titan RTX is all we can use. And you don't need a super powerful CPU if you're going to use OpenCL, something with a better balance between multi-threaded and single-threaded performance should improve the total rendering time over the 64-core monster that is destined to run at slower clock speed. Something like Ryzen 3950X or even 3900X will probably perform as good as it gets. If you intend to use the raw-in-DNG-out workflow, get a fast NVME storage drive for Helicon Focus cache folder, it will let you fully take advantage of our "Parallel image loading" option as well as the cache folder itself.
Re: Building fastest possible stacking workstation
My Ryzen 7 3700X works really well with Helicon, so a 3950X would be even faster.
I also use a PCIe 4 NMVE drive and a low end Quadro card. The combination means the stacking is very fast. I use a RAM cache drive for the Helicon cache folder (using SoftPerfect RAM Disk). That is even faster than the GIGABYTE GP-ASM2NE6100TTTD (SSD) which has reads speeds of 5,500 and write of 4,200 MBs. The RAM Drive is over 10,500 MBs read and 7,500 MBs writes using 3200MHz RAM.
If I overclock the CPU, my benchmarks go a lot higher. My 8 core CPU competes against 12 and 16 core CPUs in the Helicon benchmarks, if overclocked to 4GHz.
I have a good match between my CPU, MB, RAM, SSD and RAM drive with no obvious bottle necks. I stack using the CPU as my workstation graphics card is a few years old and OpenCL performance is weak. CPU performance when stacking is so good I did not feel the need to upgrade the graphics card.
I also use a PCIe 4 NMVE drive and a low end Quadro card. The combination means the stacking is very fast. I use a RAM cache drive for the Helicon cache folder (using SoftPerfect RAM Disk). That is even faster than the GIGABYTE GP-ASM2NE6100TTTD (SSD) which has reads speeds of 5,500 and write of 4,200 MBs. The RAM Drive is over 10,500 MBs read and 7,500 MBs writes using 3200MHz RAM.
If I overclock the CPU, my benchmarks go a lot higher. My 8 core CPU competes against 12 and 16 core CPUs in the Helicon benchmarks, if overclocked to 4GHz.
I have a good match between my CPU, MB, RAM, SSD and RAM drive with no obvious bottle necks. I stack using the CPU as my workstation graphics card is a few years old and OpenCL performance is weak. CPU performance when stacking is so good I did not feel the need to upgrade the graphics card.