By including Lucas’ name with the @ symbol, Svetlana is alerting him to this discussion. He is a DxO engineer.
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Cheers Lucas
tomkeet I have an Nvidia 1050 in one of my (WIN10) machines and my main monitor is connected via the 1050 and my secondary monitor via the inbuilt graphics output of the installed I7-4790K.
In the attached screen snapshot with PL4 and PL5 running, the display shows both packages as soon as they are started and they do not vanish from the group even when they are sitting there idle, i.e. they are still there many hours later!
Whether this changes in any way if (both) the monitors are attached to the inbuilt graphics I cannot say.
Prior to the taking the above screen shot I originally started PL4 and monitored the GPU statistics using HWInfo. This is a free download and @Savay reminded me about this piece of software when I wrongly stated that my graphics cards were not working “hard” when processing PL5 DeepPRIME images!
One thing that I noticed was that the use of the GPU processor went to 80-100% for a short time whenever a photo with DeepPRIMEnoise reduction was selected from the thumbnails, coinciding with the “swirlling” activity icon as the image is rendered for the screen, and to 100% again when exporting such a photo but obviously for a much longer period of time.
Bryan
Hi Bryan,
Thanks for the information.
Started PL5 and left it idle, DXO Photolab.exe running.
Exported in High Quality, DXO Photolab.exe running then disappeared in NVIDIA control panel.
Exported in Deep Prime and DXO Photolab processingcore.exe running then disappeared.
Hi @tomkeet it appears that the product is working ?
Are you concerned about a change of behaviour from PL4 to PL5 or is this the first time you have used PhotoLabs?
I have just checked on my test machine (similar configuration but with a 1050Ti card) and both PL4 and PL5 are present on the ‘Nvidia GPU Activity’ screen’ and on this machine both my monitors are connected to the 1050Ti. On my main machine they are still there, the machine has been running all night because switching between PL4 and PL5 I encountered a “problem” I want to investigate further!
I tried to change the configuration on my test machine to only use one monitor and to connect via the onboard graphics but that didn’t work because I believe that I changed the Bios to only use the card when I experienced some problem or another when I first installed it!!?? I can probably test it on my main machine but only after I have finished investigating the “problem” I encountered.
So is(/are) your monitor(/monitors) connected to the 1650 or to the onboard graphics?
Otherwise I have run out of ideas and hopefully DxO (@Lucas ) might be able to shed some light.
Sorry I can’t be more help (at least until I can reboot my main system).
Hi Bryan,
Thanks for your reply.
Been using PL since PL3 and I’m sure using PL4 behaved differently i.e. NVIDIA control panel always showed PL4 running.
I only use a Acer Nitro 17" with Windows 11 Pro, Version 21H2 Laptop, Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i5-11300H @ 3.10GHz with Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Graphics.
Which is set to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 when PL5 is running .
Hello @tomkeet,
We do not know which criteria is used by NVIDIA control panel to tell when an application is using the NVIDIA GPU or not. I would not worry about it unless you see that you’re not getting the expected speed boost where GPU heavy tasks are done.
For most of the work with PL5, the Intel Iris Xe will be enough and there’s no reason in these cases to use the NVIDIA GPU (it’ll just use more watts and make your laptop heat more). PL5 is expected to benefit from the use of your NVIDIA GPU in these two cases:
- in the demosaicing step (conversion from RAW to RGB data) of the main preview at zoom > 75% if you have OpenCL enabled in Preferences, and use HQ denoising or no denoising
- when exporting with DeepPRIME, assuming that you let “Auto” or have set your NVIDIA GPU in advanced preferences for DeepPRIME acceleration.
So depending on which of the above two use cases are relevant for you, I suggest that you disable/enable OpenCL or change DeepPRIME acceleration setting to confirm that you get the expected speed-up. Please note that DeepPRIME acceleration setting change requires a PL5 restart.
Best regards,
Lucas
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Hi Lucas,
Thank you for the information.
@tomkeet & @Lucas at great personal expense to my knees and back I shutdown my main machine and disconnected my main screen from the 1050 card and restarted. No applications show in the GPU activity until I start PL4 and PL5 and then they both take up residence and stay there!
When I looked at your response to my post I realised that you are using a laptop which will be using the graphics chip all the time (or will it)?! The only other difference I can spot is that you are on Win11 Pro and I am on Win10 Pro 21H1, otherwise I have no explanation for the situation!
Just to complicate the issue further I changed the configuration on my main machine this morning to drive the main monitor from the onboard 4790K graphics so that the 1050 has no monitor connections at all! DxO showed in the NVIDIA GPU Activity screen from the start and remains there.
There was no activity shown on the graphics card by HWINFO whatsoever until I attempted an export of a DeepPRIME (DP) image; the card is running almost 20 degrees C lower!
The above statement is not entirely true, selecting an icon marked as DP causes the 1050 GPU frequency to jump from 139.0MHz to 1354.0 MHz, the amount of GPU processor used is essentially too small to notice but the same does not happen for any photos not marked as DP, the 1050 shows no change from its “idle” state at all; neither does increasing the zoom factor or scrolling around a zoomed in DP image.
So the figures quoted by me previously were mostly as a consequence of “normal” graphics activity to the main monitor (connected to the 1050 at that time), including normal display activity from PL5.
These figures were on a machine where PL5 is configured with ‘OpenCL’ ON. My test machine is configured with both monitors connected to the slightly faster 1050Ti and runs with ‘OpenCL’ OFF so I ought to run some tests in that configuration, change to having no monitors connected to the 1050Ti and see if there is any affect on (export) speed?
I just processed 20 photos (on the 4790K with 1050 2GB, no monitor connections to the card) with OpenCL ON in 6 mins 17s and with OpenCL OFF in 6mins 16s, i,e, essentially the same.
Hi Bryan,
You have carried a lot of test there, very interesting.
May the difference is between Windows 10 / 11? In Windows 10 I did not select the NVIDIA Graphics driver (I think) were as in Windows 11 you do.
Hi Bryan,
Just tried it reinstalling PL4 and same result as PL5. Maybe some thing to do with Windows 11 and having to select NVIDIA Graphics driver in Windows 11.
Tom (@tomkeet) Sorry about the size of the write-up which skirts around the issue that you were originally concerned about. If you download and install either the installable or portable version of HWINFO you can monitor the use of your 1650 in your laptop as shown in the attached. This also shows a graph created by GPU-Z from TechPowerUp, also a free product.
One problem when you start to dig is just what you turn up!! I originally ran tests that showed little or no 1050 activity, except for a change in GPU processor speed, as I traversed a folder of 20 RW2 photos all with DP selected. Unfortunately the snapshots I took were pdfs (I forgot to change the option) and I wanted a jpg.
So I went to redo the tests but the new release of PL5 came out so I installed it and repeated the tests and this time there was a discernible use of processor as a went from photo to photo??? This is shown in the HWINFO screen grab and in the spikes in the GPU-Z screen grab in the GPU load row.
Hi Bryan,
Sorry for late reply been away.
Interesting information, thanks.
I keep watching NVIDIA GPU Activity when exporting etc and things seam to be working ok.
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Hi Tom (@tomkeet)
Good to hear that things appear to be working O.K., albeit with the “wrinkle” of the ‘NVIDIA GPU Activity’ screen.
I must apologise (again) for not reading your original post thoroughly and realising that you were using a laptop. I still need to decide on the “best” connection strategy for my monitors for PL5 and any other graphics intensive packages that I run (I am not a gamer but I do some minor video editing).
Hi Bryan,
I’m not a gamer either just using the fairly new Laptop with Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i5-11300H @ 3.10GHz on Windows 11 pro, Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Graphics which meets my needs for photography etc.
Hi Tom (@tomkeet)
I had wondered about that, I was surprised at how powerful the laptop was for the money, the power of the CPU and GPU exceed my machine(s). So happy photography and photo editing.
My son sent me an email showing an RX6900XT for £1,199.99 according to my general calculations it is essentially about 6 times more powerful than my 1050Ti (which cost me about £160 so that yields a price for power cost of £960 so “only” a little overpriced, but the 1050ti was overpriced because of the scarcity).
However the card is huge, so new case, probably new power supply and at 300W when it is working it is consuming a lot of electricity! I will run a test with my current configuration to try to assess how much power is used while the graphics card is idling. However, if I moved to a Ryzen 5 5600X there are no onboard graphics so the GPU will be in use all the time!
I had decided that something that reduces the processing time from132 seconds (for processing the D850 batch in the spreadsheet) for the 1050Ti to about 40-50 seconds would be acceptable but an RTX 2060 only manages about 70 seconds and we are still talking about at least £500 for such a card.
I do realise that the more up-to-date and more powerful GPUs offer a lot more features than a 1050Ti but I am only interested in their ability to handle PL5 rendering. when it comes to the final export I could split the load between the two machines and halve the final render time (almost).
But I have encountered lots of “opportunities” for creating virtual copies, caused by mixing “rogue” DOPs with the PL5 database. Basically it will work if I copy the DOPs and Photos from machine 1 to machine 2, render (export) the selected half on 2 and only ship the exported Photos from the selected half back to machine 1.
I did do a test with machine 2 accessing the original photos and DOPs on machine 1 across the LAN and I believe that it worked if exporting was the only activity but it is very easy to create a situation where Virtual copies are created that need to be cleaned up. The process has been well documented on the forum but I am trying to avoid creating complications while at the same time spending loads of money on a graphics card (plus case, plus power supply plus … everything else) and create a “gas” guzzler!
Hi Bryan,
Well your well into PC’s, years ago I used to make them from scratch to whatever I could afford but now a days I take the easy option and buy a Laptop (my age and getting lazy)!!
Hi Tom (@tomkeet)
Apart from my aging laptop all my machines are home builds and have been since a very long time ago. However, a pre built machine may well be the only way to get a good deal on the graphics card because they frequently lower their margin on the most expensive element (currently the graphics card) to keep the cost competitive.
Typically I port a build from one machine to another (clone the SSD) and then sort the licensing issue out for those that check the machines finger print every time (like PL5). The porting is not to fool the licensing but rather to ensure continuity, it has taken a long time to get my machines the way they are and it would take a huge amount of time to rebuild the software environment from scratch.
Some of my history is included in PL5 - DeepPrime and performance gain on Windows? - #22 by BHAYT. I can understand looking for a more straightforward route but I don’t find putting the hardware together anything like as complicated as trying to make an old build sit comfortably on new hardware!? I would still have that problem if I purchased a ready built system!
Hi Tom - I have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 GPU too …
Rather than using the NVIDIA Control Panel to monitor usage, try Windows Task Manager instead;
-
Hold down Ctrl+Shift and press the Esc key
-
Highlight the GTX 1650 on the LHS, and click on the title “GPU” above the graphs - and select components to be monitored as per my screenshot below … taken with Export to Disk running on an image for which DeepPRIME is set.
Also note really useful points made by Lucas, above … esp. paragraph 2 and the following bullet-points.
John M
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John-M,
Thank you I will look the next time I export.