----- Original Message ----- > Matthieu Moy <matthieu....@grenoble-inp.fr> writes: > > > 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. > > Thanks to all those who responded. Based on these advices, it seems this > configuration would be a nice compromise:
I ended up buying this configuration: > http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00126228.html (french only I guess, sorry) > Core i5-4460 => not the best, but a good quad-core > Radeon R9 270 2 Gb => good floating point performance according to > gpuboss (2,355 GFLOPS) > 8 Gb RAM DDR3 => not huge, but 2 slots available so a jump to 16 Gb or > even 24 Gb is rather easy. > Disk 1 To => enough to hold a few year's of RAWs for me ;-). > No OS > 690 € What a breath of fresh air to use darktable on this compared to my old computer... A little feedback to help other people looking for advices: The OpenCL performance is really good compared to the pure software implementation (I had to install the proprietary driver to get OpenCL, not sure whether it's supposed to work with 100% free software). I benchmarked a bit (using darktable-cli): One image with a lot of processing, with OpenCL: 7.12s user 1.20s system 118% cpu 7.033 total Same image, without OpenCL: 107.04s user 1.37s system 368% cpu 29.392 total 30 images with reasonably amount of processing, with OpenCL: 128.39s user 17.74s system 127% cpu 1:54.91 total Same 30 images, without OpenCL: 1247.44s user 11.92s system 355% cpu 5:54.10 total Therefore: * OpenCL is 3 to 4 times faster than non-OpenCL on this machine. * When using OpenCL, the CPU is not used much (around 120% CPU out of 4 CPU = around 1/3 of the CPU available). When watching the CPU usage with gnome-system-monitor, I see that the CPU usage never goes above 60% for a given CPU. Good job dt developers, you're using OpenCL wherever possible it seems :-). So, I confirm that having a good GPU is more important than having a good CPU for darktable, and spending more money on a better processor (like i5 -> i7) would probably not have improved much. I watched the RAM after a reasonably long darktable session, with Digikam and Firefox open too, and the 8 Gb were not fully used (and swap wasn't touched). So, I'll wait a bit before buying more RAM (but will sure need to do so before the end of the machine's life). -- Matthieu Moy http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming. The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
