Recommended x86 system specs

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waldenk
Posts: 31
Joined: 15.02.2015 19:17

Recommended x86 system specs

Post by waldenk »

I’m shooting deep 200-300+ large .nef image stacks with my Z7…and tired of the hour+ wait for my older Lenovo Yoga (core i7, 1.9GHz, 4 cores, 16Gb memory, no special graphics card or HW) running Helicon to chew through these files. Any suggested optimal system configurations for —significantly— faster performance? I’m looking for a desktop box or a NUC since i’ve already got plenty of high quality monitors and other peripherals. Thanks!
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Catherine
Posts: 1163
Joined: 29.04.2019 22:38

Re: Recommended x86 system specs

Post by Catherine »

The simple answer is the more CPU power and GPU power you have, the faster it will process. Any 8-core CPU and any GPU with 8 GB of video memory will do fine and will be a significant improvement. 16 GB of system memory (RAM) is just about enough, 32 GB is better.

An hour even for a 300 images in a stack seems a bit too long, it's possible that you could improve performance of your Lenovo by optimizing the settings. Send a bug report after processing one of your long stacks if you want us to look into it. Does your laptop has SSD or HDD (spinning magnetic disk)? Where are your source images located? Helicon Focus cannot process images faster than it can load them from the storage, this is a potential bottleneck. Similarly, SSD vs. HDD makes a big difference, sometimes even huge difference.
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TheDocAUS
Posts: 50
Joined: 09.12.2016 14:00

Re: Recommended x86 system specs

Post by TheDocAUS »

Take a look at these benchmarks to help you make a choice: https://www.heliconsoft.com/helicon_foc ... benchmark/

8 core GPU with a modern mid range GPU will work very nicely.

My 8 core AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with the NVIDIA Quadro RTX4000 gives me a score of 582.77, under Win 10.
SE_Metlab
Posts: 2
Joined: 27.01.2023 19:24

Re: Recommended x86 system specs

Post by SE_Metlab »

Hi,
Thinking about buying a new pc to do macro stacking 100+ images (full frame, etc) and was wondering what graphic card was best performance wise. Our IT service tends to offer us with Quadro cards for workstations, are they equivalent to the gaming cards (GeForce RTX™ 3080 Ti and the like) for stacking? Does HF perform better on AMD hardware (CPU & graphic card) or Intel + Nvidia?
Thanks,
Alex
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Catherine
Posts: 1163
Joined: 29.04.2019 22:38

Re: Recommended x86 system specs

Post by Catherine »

Hi Alex,

It makes no difference how you combine CPU and GPU brands. Quadro cards can be as fast as their gaming counterpart, or they can be slower, depending on the model in question. You need to look up the specific model you might be looking at (Techpowerup database is a good resource for that, or check if this GPU is in the list of benchmark results on our website).

Faster GPUs do result in shorter rendering times, but the difference becomes diminishing for top GPUs, and it becomes as important or even more important to have fast RAM and a CPU with fast RAM access than it is to have the top GPU. And don't forget your total time spent in Helicon Focus is always longer than just rendering, especially when working with raw files - the total rendering time is dominated by the raw converter, not rendering as such.
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