Hi Matthieu, I would take at least 16GB RAM. There's no such thing as too much of it. Even if an application might not strictly require it, you still have a much larger file system cache for the Kernel to toy with. That's nice even if you have a fast SSD.
I have never enjoyed the speed of OpenCL on a fast GPU. My current fast computer is a laptop with an intel i7-4770HQ, that's the one with the fastest available internal GPU. Intel is currently developing an OpenCL driver called beignet... http://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/Beignet/ ... but it just never worked for me. I regularly try its current git master, but darktable always crashes with it. As beignet seems to be fairly new, I thinks it's not darktable's fault, so I never barked. Maybe it's neither dt's nor beignet's fault but mine. :-) I have absolutely no idea if I could expect a speedup with OpenCL on that GPU. While it is goddamn fast for an internal one and has an extra L4 cache to compensate for the shared RAM, it's still slower than a good graphics card with plenty of dedicated graphics memory. I you want to buy that PC specifically to enjoy darktable, then you absolutely want OpenCL. It seems to be the best idea to have a good graphics card with enormous amounts of memory and some standard CPU like an i5. That's the gist on this list, afaik. Just be sure that OpenCL will work. And maybe there is reason to prefer AMD since they at least *have* an Open Source driver (meaning: in-Kernel, hassle-free) which improved considerably recently. I don't know if it supports OpenCL now, probably not, but you have a valid chance that it might work with the free driver and a good performance some day without setting up anything. That's my 2 cents... Michael Am Freitag, den 23.01.2015, 17:35 +0100 schrieb Matthieu Moy: > Hi, > > I'm considering replacing my old computer with one that would let > darktable run better. I'm seeking advices on which hardware pieces are > the most important. > > About RAM, I currently have 4 Gb and it's clearly not much for dt, so 8 > seems to be a minimum to work comfortably. Do you think it's worth > paying a bit more to get 16 Gb? Or 32 Gb? > > Should I priviledge the CPU or the graphics card? I mean, if I get a > good graphics card, is it still worth paying a high-end CPU or will most > of the processing be delegated to the GPU anyway? OTOH, many CPU (like > core i5/i7) already have a built-in GPU so I was wondering whether having > an expansive CPU and no graphics card could be a better idea. > > Thanks in advance for your advices, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
