I have to assume that very high £5000 cost reference is just hyperbole. If you are on Windows, what processor and graphics card is in your computer. When does you computer date from? Keep in mind that current versions of most higher end post processing software now require significant upgrades to older hardware in order to use some of the latest features. Older machines are often not up to the task. It is important to look at the system requirements for each new version of software released. Unfortunately, most currents users of software they like don’t always take that into consideration. That is why the 30 day free trial of PhotoLab is so important.
If you are on Windows 10, unless your processor and overall hardware is very low end, it is possible the most important upgrade would be a graphics card and possibly a new power supply and cooling fan. It still requires an expense, but it would be a fraction of the £5000 you mentioned. If you are on a MAC, that is a different story because they are so expensive.
Depending on the age of the motherboard, it may not have the PCIe bus ‘lanes’ or version needed to support the more recent GPUs, so you’re in for a m’board as well - and why do that without upgrading the processor?
I’m in process of building a new PC which should work well with v9 (new case, power supply, motherboard, processor+cooling, GPU). Cost was USD1688, could have been maybe $200 less if I hadn’t also picked everything for low noise. Pretty far from £5000.
I picked an AMD RX 9070 based on this thread Choosing a GPU for DxO Photolab: the answer? - DxO PhotoLab - DxO Forum, the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X as it was the best performance I could get for a 65W TDP (making it relatively low noise).
If you are on a MAC, that is a different story because they are so expensive.
In March of this year, I paid $1799 for an M4 Mac mini desktop with 32 GB memory and 2 TB very fast internal SSD. Maximum continuous power rated at only 155W. It is fully capable of running the latest DxO software.
That looks pretty good to me compared to the cost and power needs of the latest PCs being spec’d on this forum.
I’m a PC fan (mostly due to not having used Macs much, though there’s always the trope that Apple is crazily priced).
That said, if I were looking at speccing out a new PC now I’d probably expect to pay ~£1,500 depending on a few specifics (and not including any super-pricey monitor upgrade).
A GPU upgrade alone would take up £500 of that. I anticipate a CPU is another £300-odd, £200 for the motherboard, £100-150 for the RAM. £100-150 for the PSU… then there’s storage. I’d need a lot of it overall, but could get a system up and running for under £100 for an SSD.
Mini PCs and MACs are great if you can afford to dedicate a machine to photo editing and then have another PC to do all the other things you might want to do. There is a storage and upgrade issue and that’s why Mini PCs are the price they are. They are virtually disposable which in this day and age isn’t great.
We can chat about the pros and cons of cloud storage until the cows come home. But basically, if you rent software or cloud storage…………………. well, good luck. Personally, I own my car, I own my house and I made those choices because renting is just wasted money and still people who believe in owning vehicles and homes still rent software and storage. Truely amazes me.
GPU prices are extortionate and the AI masking is going to require a decent upgrade, as for the loupe, try running that at 200 or 300% and see how long that takes.
It’s just the emperors new clothes. Everyone tells me that Ferraris are great cars, so what?
I am a PC fan because when Apple admitted to sending software updates to their phones that slowed them down so they would make people buy new ones, I realised that they could not be trusted. So I voted with me feet. I realised you could buy as good a product elsewhere for much less money. Unfortunately, many people are so far down the rabbit hole that they can not envisage living without their precious Apple device.
Apart from the buggy AI masks, I don’t find any objections to performance. Really… My PC is 10 years old (sure, it was top stuff when new…) and my GPU is 5 years old. Performance could be snappier, but it definitely is not a chore to use. Even the loupe is reasonably fast.
And this, I will never repeat it enough, on an i7 6700K with 32 GB RAM, SSD and RTX 3070. Any decent modern machine should eat it for breakfast.
Sadly I have to agree; both that GPU prices are ridiculous these days and that AI masking and PL9 seem progressively unoptimised or poorly put together (I hesitate to agree that’s just the way things are, as competing products seem in much better places).
I paid £500 for a second hand 1080Ti a few years ago and it’s done well enough since then. I game from time to time and it can even run modern titles like Stalker 2 at 1440p without me having to drop everything to low. I didn’t think PhotoLab would be the first thing to make me think I really needed an upgrade.
Now I see I can get an AMD 9070XT for more like £600 these days. That’s still a crazy amount of money but apparently that’s a good deal (and compare it with nVidia’s 5xxx cards and… it kinda is!)
Ferrari’s are great but the yardstick for affording a car shouldn’t be: can you afford a Ferrari (and that shouldn’t be the case with photo editing software either).
I wish I could say the same. My machine is also 10 years old (and my GPU is 3 years older than yours) but I find the latest performance for PhotoLab to be quite awful. 2 minutes 30 to export a single photo(?!) and performance while using the product quickly tanks while making edits too.
Maybe a 3070 would solve some of my problems, who knows. But the 1080Ti is still considered a bit of a tank and I’m not trying to run RTX or DLSS here, so it should still have the raw horsepower to cope. Hell, it even has 4gb more RAM than your 3070 on paper…!
The problem with every Mini is upgrading and storage, they are literally disposable, which isn’t great. 2Tb wouldn’t hold my music collection. So for me that’s another standalone PC just to do photo editing, that will be obsolete in two years when the latest Photolab AI software is released.
If you’ve ever used Google’s AI you’ll know that it has a very long way to go, a very long way. And if Google are struggling, you can bet all the small companies without the budget or ability are. I’d prefer DxO to address the last 5 years of problems that are still out standing rather than guinepigging us with an AI mask that is………………. problematic, to be nice.
I suspect that most photographers don’t want to build a new PC every time DxO update Photolab. After all their hobby is photography. The number of people who build their own PCs is apparently under 3%, so for the other 97% it’s going to cost them dearly.
When I assembled my current PC, I spent 2400 EUR including the 4K monitor.
I tried to replicate the same configuration on an iMac: same processor (at the time Apple was still using Intel), same amount of RAM and storage, similar GPU, etc etc. The iMac would have cost 4200 EUR, for the same technology and level of performance.
Unacceptable price difference, especially considering that I like to tinker on every small detail and configuration option as an admin, that I want my system to be user-maintainable, and that I like gaming once in a while too.
Macs are available in a wide range of prices. As stated a bit earlier I paid $1799 earlier this year for a DxO capable Mac. If you as a PC guy can get a new PC that runs DxO PhotoLab 9 for 1500, I don’t know what you all are complaining about.
