Helicon Soft Forum

Hi,

I am doing focus stacking with around 50-100 images from Fuji GFX 100S (102 Mpixel images). In the future I will go higher magnification so 300-400 image stacks will be needed.

System is

- Threadripper 3960X 24-Core Processor
- MSI SuprimX RTX 3090
- 32GB RAM

I bought this system as used and for some unknown reason the previous owner installed only 32Gb RAM.
When doing focus stacking I see very frequently 99% RAM usage, regardless of the memory cache setting used.

Does Helicon Focus benefit from more memory installed? If I switch to 128Gb RAM is it possible I could see an increase in speed?

Thank you,
Cristian

Hi Christian, there is definitely going to be a performance increase from increasing the amount of RAM when your usage hits 99% (unless it only does so very briefly). But increasing beyond however much RAM is needed will not improve rendering speed. Although if you like to switch between source images in your stack or between different rendered stacks, you will benefit from a larger cache (which means higher memory consumption). 64 GB should be quite enough unless you like to multi-task heavily (e. g. assuming Helicon Focus can get at least 40 GB or more for itself).

In order to reduce memory consumption while you have 32 GB, set the memory cache size to 0 and parallel image loading to Disabled. And close all other memory-hungry programs. 32 GB should be enough (barely) for 100 Megapixel images, and the number of images in a stack almost doesn't matter.

Ok, thank you very much.