@BoxBrownie My system is an i7 4970K with 24GB, 4 HDDs, 2 x SATA SSDs and one NVME connected via a graphics card slot on a PCie card.
The power supply is a Seasonic Platinum and the most power consumption that a power meter has shown (so far) with my new RTX3060, when processing DP XD, is about 330W or thereabouts and the machine idles around 100W with most of the normal graphics routed via the onboard Intel chipset.
With respect to choosing the best graphics card I would suggest that it is a mixture of graphics card AND CPU. The problem is that its is easier to change graphics card than CPU, if I wanted to change CPU then I would need to
- Buy a new processor
- A board to run it
- New memory (DDR3 won’t run on the board I will need DDR4)
That all “just” costs money, then we come to all the software installed!
I should, hopefully be able to clone the Boot SSD (although I initially had trouble moving to the i7-4790K from a previous generation of processor and motherboard) and install the clone into the new machine but every piece of software that uses a machine footprint will need to be re-licensed!
The issue comes down to this, which I have been “banging on” about for weeks, replacing the GTX 1050 with the RTX 3060 has shifted the “problem” with exporting away from the GPU to the CPU.
It hasn’t completely eradicated GPU time for DP exports but the Noise Reduction component (mostly GPU with some CPU to control the process) now accounts for 96 seconds of the time of an export of 109 RAW images I took yesterday which took 595 seconds in total. This took 1181 seconds on an almost identical i7-4790K with a GTX 1050Ti GPU and the NR component was 738 seconds, i.e. 738 seconds for NR down to 96 seconds.
DP XD is a bigger problem with the 1050Ti card the whole export took 3358 seconds and the NR component was a “mere” 2915 seconds. The export time is now 744 seconds and the NR component is 245, and while it is possible that an even more expensive and faster graphics card could reduce that further, the biggest component now is the CPU only element of 499 seconds.
The techpower web site ranks the 1050Ti as 33% compared with the 3060 at 100% but looking at the performance ratios the older card is performing below that ratio I think and PhotoLabs clearly only uses part of the card and only for short periods of time.
The problem is that no-one from DxO comes near the forum @Musashi and we need real guidance to point to what features DP and DP XD actually exploit on the GTX and the RTX and the Radeon cards to better guide our use and purchases, but I won’t hold my breath waiting.
Putting testing etc. to one side we went for a walk along the paths around one of the two adjoining Golf courses that use the Southern slopes of the downs for their fairways yesterday (Sunday)
I then used the 109 pictures I took to run a variety of tests, and these are summarised in the following tables
In the tables I classify the NR element as GPU, but it has to contain an element of CPU to control the GPU elements and consolidate the results into the image etc.
The %age column is the comparison of the GPU (NR) time per image for the 3060 divided by the same figure for the 1050Ti. There may be better ways of expressing this but clearly the improvement for DP is better than the improvement for DP XD on my systems, with my RAW images and my edits, other users may do better or worse than this!
The Google spreadsheet is useful but it is “simply” comparing the overall time to complete the whole job and is actually rolling the CPU usage (governed by the CPU power and the ability of DxPL to use that power productively) together with the GPU usage (governed by the GPU power and the ability of DxPL to use that power productively).
A faster CPU will distort the overall score and may make a slightly slower GPU look better than it actually is.