Helicon Soft Forum

Hi, I just downloaded your latest release of Helicon Focus and I am very impressed!

I have two Windows machines with 64gb of DDR5 and PCIe 5 NVME 4TB drives.

My graphics cards are old Nvidia 3060 8gb and Nvidia 3070 8gb.

What would be a good video card for stacking 400 to 800 raw images from a Sony A7R2 camera. The TIFs created are about 242mb each.

I am disappointed with the current prices of the Nvidia cards and I was thinking about a AMD Radeon 9060 XT OC 16gb card. Will this card be as fast as the Nvidia 5060 16gb card. I don't do gaming and I would only use the new graphics card for Helicon Focus stacking.

Is the Radeon RTX 9070 that much better than the 9060 in Helicon Focus?

What about your benchmarks on the Apple M3 Pro. How to they translate to the Intel PC numbers?

Thank you for the excellent software and your time and efforts!

Mike Herring

Hi Mike,

We don't have benchmark data on the 9060 XT yet, but its theoretical computational performance is barely ahead of RTX 3070, I don't think it's a worthy upgrade. But final judgement can only be made with real-world data that we will get after customers with that GPU upload their benchmark results.

Does your system support a PCI-e 5.0 x16 link to the GPU?

Keep in mind that the total time from pressing "Render" to seeing the result on the screen is more than just GPU computation part, so 2x faster GPU doesn't mean 2x shorter overall time. Also, it sounds like you're pre-converting your images to TIFF, which is not accounted for in the Helicon Focus runtime, but it does add to your overall workflow latency. And that also can't be sped up by the GPU.

And if you want faster renders, un-tick the "Show intermediary results" option in the Helicon Focus preferences - General.

Hi Catherine,

Thanks for the information.

Regarding: Does your system support a PCI-e 5.0 x16 link to the GPU?
Yes.

Which card would you recommend in order to take advantage of the PCI-e 5.0 x16 link to the GPU?

Many thanks for your help!

Mike

Hi Mike,
We can't give any recommendations until we get more data on how the upcoming new version of Helicon Focus performs on different hardware. But it looks like 9070 XT will be at most twice as fast as your RTX 3070, so anything lower than it will be slower. And this is just the GPU computation phase, the total end-to-end processing time will again be longer than that.