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.
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.
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)!!
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.
