Is It New Graphics Card Time?

Bristolian

Bristolian

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Steve
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With the release of the new denoise feature in Lightroom I have been experimenting - never a good idea!

I have denoised several images of garden birds (which I shot at ISO 20,000 - 25,600) using the new LRC feature and Topaz DeNoise. The end result from both methods have proven to be very similar to the point that I find it difficult to tell them apart. Happy days! I can save some money by not renewing my Topaz license this year :)

Well maybe, but the denoising in LRC is taking an average of 15 minutes per image whereas in Topaz it's just 90 seconds! Those timings are from the moment I press go in LR to the moment the finished picture is on screen. Looking at Task Manager during the process I see one big difference; both applications drive the graphics card to 100% of its capacity but Topaz also makes use of the CPU as well, whereas LR doesn't. This is true no matter what setting I use in LR's preferences > performance tab.

In comparison, my laptop handles the image in just over 4 minutes via Topaz and about 3 1/2 minutes via the new LR feature. Neither are what I would call quick but are in-line with my expectation considering the laptop is a "business" tool rather than a gaming one. The NVIDIA MX350 graphics in the laptop does the heavy lifting but it isn't continuously running at 100%.

The PC has the following specification:
CPU: Intel i5-8400 2.8GHz
MoBo: ASUS Prime Z370-P
RAM: 32GB Crucial DDR4 2400
GPU: NVIDIA GT1030
OS: Win 11 x64 22H2 (build 22621.1265)
OS Drive: 480GB M.2 SSD
LR Drive: 250GB SSD
Data Drive: 2TB Seagate HDD

So, am I looking at a new graphics card, a new CPU or maybe something else (like maybe a Mac Mini)?
 
Graphics cards are hideously expensive just now, not quite as hideous as last year but there's still massive profiteering going on.

If you do get a new one it's worth checking that your PSU has enough wattage to drive it first.
 
I just updated my LRC to get this Denoise AI and did a few tests. It's rather nice and keeps details sharp. Impressive.

For me it took 9 seconds to denoise an A9 RAW file and it was pretty much all GPU power, going to almost 100%. The CPU barely went above 5%, the RAM barely moved and neither did the SSD drive, so I think you are onto the right track here with upgrading just the graphics card.

I'm using an RTX 3060Ti FE if that helps as a rough idea as the power you will need if you want roughly 9 second denoising (depending the file size etc).
 
2 year old Dell tower with:
i7 - 9700 @ 3.00GHz
Geforce RTX 2060 with 6G Ram

Lightroom Denoise on D800 and z9 NEFs takes 20-30 seconds
 
gman said:
I just updated my LRC to get this Denoise AI and did a few tests. It's rather nice and keeps details sharp. Impressive.

For me it took 9 seconds to denoise an A9 RAW file and it was pretty much all GPU power, going to almost 100%. The CPU barely went above 5%, the RAM barely moved and neither did the SSD drive, so I think you are onto the right track here with upgrading just the graphics card.

I'm using an RTX 3060Ti FE if that helps as a rough idea as the power you will need if you want roughly 9 second denoising (depending the file size e
Click to expand...
 
My son who is into all this suggested a ( 3.80 gigahertz AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core) was better than intel which is now in my computer together with a ( NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti ) together with DDR4 32GB RAM
This handles 4k video with ease, if that is any help
 
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Forgive me for interrupting but where is the LR Denoise feature to be found?

EDIT: Never mind, found it.
 
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gman said:
Graphics cards are hideously expensive just now, not quite as hideous as last year but there's still massive profiteering going on.

If you do get a new one it's worth checking that your PSU has enough wattage to drive it first.
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Hi Graham,

Thanks for your response. You are right, cards are still rather on the expensive side but within affordable budget :)

The PSU in the pc has plenty of spare capacity as it was built with things like this in mind :)
 
A good trade off between price and performance seems to be around the Nvidia 3060 cards, generally about £300 these days, or a Radeon 6600/6700 for around the same price.

I probably wouldn't go for anything older/slower than this for what you're doing.
 
Photograph said:
Get an Intel Arc A770 16GB. That will give you plenty of performance and vram for years.
Click to expand...
Hi Photograph and thanks for your recommendation. I haven't looked at this particular card card before ... but will now :)
 
gman said:
I just updated my LRC to get this Denoise AI and did a few tests. It's rather nice and keeps details sharp. Impressive.

For me it took 9 seconds to denoise an A9 RAW file and it was pretty much all GPU power, going to almost 100%. The CPU barely went above 5%, the RAM barely moved and neither did the SSD drive, so I think you are onto the right track here with upgrading just the graphics card.

I'm using an RTX 3060Ti FE if that helps as a rough idea as the power you will need if you want roughly 9 second denoising (depending the file size etc).
Click to expand...
Hi again Graham,

I have been looking at the RTX3060 this afternoon. There are, of course, several versions with Ti FE etc on the end but I am struggling to see what the differences are :(

More research needed.
 
Bristolian said:
There are, of course, several versions with Ti FE etc on the end but I am struggling to see what the differences are
Click to expand...

Ti is a high performance version of the chipset.

FE = Founders Edition - often modified to prevent use bitcoin mining and sold at a controlled price point through the distributor to deal with the price gouging that happened when everyone suddenly had lots of spare time to play games & prices went crazy a couple of years back.
 
realspeed said:
My son who is into all this suggested a ( 3.80 gigahertz AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core) was better than intel which is now in my computer together with a ( NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti ) together with DDR4 32GB RAM
This handles 4k video with ease, if that is any help
Click to expand...
Hi Bazza,

The old Intel vs AMD contest :banana: Unfortunately, that change is not on the cards as it would require a new MoBo and power supply as well. That puts the whole job well into M1 Mac Mini territory and I would rather go that way. Thanks for your son's suggestion though :)
 
ancient_mariner said:
Ti is a high performance version of the chipset.

FE = Founders Edition - often modified to prevent use bitcoin mining and sold at a controlled price point through the distributor to deal with the price gouging that happened when everyone suddenly had lots of spare time to play games & prices went crazy a couple of years back.
Click to expand...
Ah, many thanks for the explanation. I shall bear all of that in mind :)
 
Right now my head is about to explode so it is time to head over to Disney+ to watch the Mandalorian :)
 
This is a pretty decent comparison site: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

It's good to get a general idea, but once a few cards have been decided on I would still do further research. One thing that stands out in that chart is the Intel graphics cards not scoring particularly high, however, I believe this may have been a firmware issue as I have seen tests done elsewhere where the Intel A770 is challenging the RTX 3060 Ti.
 
Founders edition cards are simply a manufacturer (Nvidia) produced card sold directly rather than by a third party such as Asus/Zotac/MSI. they are normally very well made and have been around for a very long time, started off being called reference cards so nothing to do with Covid/price gouging but being sold at a controlled price point obviously helps.
 
Worth noting that different brand cards do have different performance levels, but I think in this case it will be negligible.

eg.
www.guru3d.com

KFA2 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti EX review (Page 31)

We review the KFA2 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti EX 8GB, it's the value proposition from the company behind KFA2; GALAX. Armed with a duo of spinners and aimed at GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER performance levels thi...
www.guru3d.com www.guru3d.com
 
dkh said:
I just got the 3080ti for 300 off the bay... I think there are a few still there (Dell OEM)
Click to expand...

That's cheap. Fingers crossed it's a genuine gamer and not one of those hosed down crypto cards.
 
dkh said:
"DELL OEM NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti Non-LHR FHR Graphics Card GPU 8GB GDDR". Add also clearly states not used for mining. Not 3080Ti - my mistake
Click to expand...

Ah ok, still not bad though. FHR would have been the miners choice over an LHR, but then I think LHR cards were hacked anyway for mining so I guess you'll have to take their word for it. I wonder why they were being pulled from 6 month old towers?
 
£300 is about what a 3060 non-Ti goes for when you get a deal. As long as it is what it says it is then that's ok.
 
I’m going to be the boring one, what does the cost benefit analysis look like? How many years of topaz can you get for the cost of the graphics cards you are looking at?

How many noisy images do you intend to process a month and keep as final outputs?Maybe it will make you stricter for photos you really want to de noise

How much faster would a new gpu make things in your set up, would need be like for like and not sure if you can return it
 
Bristolian said:
Hi folks,

Thanks for the above. Does anyone have any experience of this card, or thoughts on it?

www.overclockers.co.uk

Gainward GeForce RTX 3060 Ghost LHR 12GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Order Gainward GeForce RTX 3060 Ghost LHR 12GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk
Click to expand...

Seems good to me, the 12GB can be handy compared to 8GB of the Ti, although the increased memory interface and bandwidth of the latter can make up for the lesser amount of Ram. I think it can depend on the application the card is being used for.

 
acrobatic_Citron said:
I’m going to be the boring one, what does the cost benefit analysis look like? How many years of topaz can you get for the cost of the graphics cards you are looking at?

How many noisy images do you intend to process a month and keep as final outputs?Maybe it will make you stricter for photos you really want to de noise

How much faster would a new gpu make things in your set up, would need be like for like and not sure if you can return it
Click to expand...
Ah, another Devil's Advocate - welcome to the club :)

In theory I need never update Topaz again so going forward that could potentially (but not likely) be a zero cost. In reality, I would probably renew my licence of Topaz Photo AI every year so something in the £120/yr region. If I can get the new Lightroom feature to work at a sensible speed then I will definitely use that instead of Topaz so the card would be paid for in about 3 years.

I shoot birds in the UK so high ISO images (i.e. ISO 5,000+) are guaranteed and of 500 shots taken in a day about 80% will be above 5,000 ISO - the threshold for me using Topaz currently. Of those I will typically edit about 75-80. If we say 75 images that need to be denoised then with my current set-up that's 112 minutes using Topaz or 1,125 minutes (18.75 hours) using the new Lightroom feature.

If a new card gets me down to the current Topaz time (about 90 secs/image) then I will be happy and can live with that. Overclockers have a 14 day no-fault return policy so I can try it out for a couple of weeks. Now that I've written that down I'm thinking why don't I just order it ans see?
 
gman said:
Seems good to me, the 12GB can be handy compared to 8GB of the Ti, although the increased memory interface and bandwidth of the latter can make up for the lesser amount of Ram. I think it can depend on the application the card is being used for.

Click to expand...
Thanks Graham,

I think I'm going to order it and suck it and see. Overclockers have a 14 day return policy so I can give it a good try out in that time.

Fingers crossed o_O :D
 
Bristolian said:
Ah, another Devil's Advocate - welcome to the club :)

In theory I need never update Topaz again so going forward that could potentially (but not likely) be a zero cost. In reality, I would probably renew my licence of Topaz Photo AI every year so something in the £120/yr region. If I can get the new Lightroom feature to work at a sensible speed then I will definitely use that instead of Topaz so the card would be paid for in about 3 years.

I shoot birds in the UK so high ISO images (i.e. ISO 5,000+) are guaranteed and of 500 shots taken in a day about 80% will be above 5,000 ISO - the threshold for me using Topaz currently. Of those I will typically edit about 75-80. If we say 75 images that need to be denoised then with my current set-up that's 112 minutes using Topaz or 1,125 minutes (18.75 hours) using the new Lightroom feature.

If a new card gets me down to the current Topaz time (about 90 secs/image) then I will be happy and can live with that. Overclockers have a 14 day no-fault return policy so I can try it out for a couple of weeks. Now that I've written that down I'm thinking why don't I just order it ans see?
Click to expand...
18.75 hours! ouf! yeah time to upgrade, good luck on your search!
Click to expand...
 
saltireblue said:
Over on another photo forum , there are several members there who are also complaining about the amount of time LR denoise is taking compared to other software. One mentoined 20 minutes and another over 30...
Click to expand...
I'd definitely be looking to check which graphics cards these people are using as I've found with older versions of Lightroom, its performance wasn't always great on high performance systems. What concerns me is the 500% percent improvement in speed mentioning in the opening post going from a 1030 to an MX350 but the MX350 is only a slightly faster card than the 1030 and overall it's still a very weak graphics card so that doesn't account for the faster rendering times.
 
JohnMcL7 said:
I'd definitely be looking to check which graphics cards these people are using as I've found with older versions of Lightroom, its performance wasn't always great on high performance systems. What concerns me is the 500% percent improvement in speed mentioning in the opening post going from a 1030 to an MX350 but the MX350 is only a slightly faster card than the 1030 and overall it's still a very weak graphics card so that doesn't account for the faster rendering times.
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Hi John,

Yes, one of the GPU comparison sites recommended the MX350 as a suitable replacement but that is what is fitted to my laptop and whilst that is streets ahead of my desktop (GT 1030 GPU) it's still slow.
 
Hi all, thanks for all the help and suggestions above. They are much appreciated and show why this is the best photography forum ever.

Just a quick update. I have pulled the trigger on the RTX 3060 I mentioned in post #30 above. It should be here on Thursday so I will be able to start testing on existing image files before the weekend and then on some new raw files from Avalon Marshes on Saturday and Flying Scotsman on Sunday. I'll keep you informed on results - fingers crossed for a happy ending :clap:
 
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JohnMcL7 said:
I'd definitely be looking to check which graphics cards these people are using as I've found with older versions of Lightroom, its performance wasn't always great on high performance systems. What concerns me is the 500% percent improvement in speed mentioning in the opening post going from a 1030 to an MX350 but the MX350 is only a slightly faster card than the 1030 and overall it's still a very weak graphics card so that doesn't account for the faster rendering times.
Click to expand...

Might be an architecture/instructions set issue, rather than processing power. Historically Adobe have been poor at using graphics power.
 
Bristolian said:
Hi all, thanks for all the help and suggestions above. They are much appreciated and show why this is the best photography forum ever.

Just a quick update. I have pulled the trigger on the RTX 3060 I mentioned in post #30 above. It should be here on Thursday so I will be able to start testing on existing image files before the weekend and then on some new raw files from Avalon Marshes on Saturday and Flying Scotsman on Sunday. I'll keep you informed on results - fingers crossed for a happy ending :clap:
Click to expand...
Good! All these 3060 cards are very much of a muchness so it’s almost choosing one you like the colour of and biting the bullet!
 
The RTX 3060 card arrived today and I initially thought "bummer it's going to have to go back" before I even managed to get it out of the packaging. The card has an 8-pin socket and my PSU doesn't have any corresponding connectors :( A quick trip onto YouTube and I can see that I'm okay as I have a 6-pin & 2-pin together which will work :)

Five minutes later and the card is in and I'm pressing the power button very gingerly. No worries though, the PC burst into life but the screen resolution looks dreadful until hey-presto all is suddenly good again. I opened my NVIDIA Experience software and it has already figured out I have a new card and that there are new drivers for it. I remembered to choose the "Studio" driver rather than the "Games" one and we are cooking with gas!

So, did forking out £300 resolve my problem with the new denoise function in LRC? Well, with the GT 1030 card the denoise process took roughly 15 minutes and with the new card it is still 15 ... but this time it's seconds not minutes. WooHoo!! Changing the settings in Photoshop and the Topaz programs so that it uses the GPU rather than the CPU and we are all set. That is what I call a result :banana:

So, thanks for all the advice and suggestions above and it's my round if we ever cross paths :)
 
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