The release of PL9 when it clearly does not work with many Nvidia GPUs was a blunder. DXO can not blame this in Nvidia or their drivers. DXO has to work 25/8 to solve this problem. If not, customers will loose faith. DXO should also inform what hardware they recommend for all of their products to work as smooth as possible. Minimum requirements just does not cut it. Computer owners also has to realize that their 3 year old “High End PC” is not high end anymore, and may be too slow to run any of the newest software in a proper fashion. It is called progress.
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Not if the particular problem is located in nVidia’s drivers, or if GPUs simply need more on-board RAM. Then it is an nVidia problem. I don’t think we know for sure, but the symptoms and support documentation suggest to me that this is largely the case.
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In French, we use this expression: yaka, yfaukon. Untranslatable…
(very roughly: we just have to do it, we have to do it)
These gratuitous statements are getting quite tiresome, when rational and coherent explanations were given above by Mwsilvers.
And I would have been quite annoyed if DxO had delayed the release of PhotoLab 9 because Nvidia was causing problems with its drivers. My AMD Radeon graphics card has no problems with PL9 (and PL9 has no problems with my card)!
This is proof that PL9 was ready when it was released.
This is indeed the case: DxO systematically provides the minimum and recommended configurations in the release notes:
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Frustrated users need to be able to blame someone when a software release like PL 9 doesn’t work 100% as expected. They tend to feel cheated.
For most, especially those who don’t fully understand the development and testing process, the easy target for their ire is DxO. They tend to not want to accept that the.immediate culprit in this specific drama are recently modified RTX drivers by Nvidia.
Hopefully, with assistance from Nvidia, DxO will be able to develop a permanent fix quickly for the issue caused by the recent versions of Nvidias drivers.
Mark
They are many month old hardly NEW drivers, not a new problem is one as you say many months ago when DXO did the development since when the drivers have changed but not PL 9
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DXO software is developed by a different team of people on a completely different software than Topaz or Lightroom. I doubt you have any idea why DxO’s development team made the development choices they did or why their software is having difficulties with Nvidia’s drivers.
You’re absolutely correct. I don’t have any idea why they made the choices they did, or why their software is having difficulties with Nvidia’s drivers…
…where other developers made different choices and their software works.
Fixing a problem caused by a change to a third party driver doesn’t usually get resolved overnight.
That is also correct, and begs the question: “Why wasn’t release held back until a fix could be made?”
PhotoLab 9 was released earlier than any other PhotoLab product (PL8 was released on September 17th, PL7 on September 27th, PL6 on October 5th, PL5 on October 20th… PL4 on October 21st…)
They tend to not want to accept that the.immediate culprit in this specific drama are recently modified RTX drivers by Nvidia.
There’s been four (so far) releases of 58x.00 drivers with the first in this number convention being July 31st. That’ll be 6 weeks ago in 2 days; 6 weeks to see there’s a problem, start working on it, and still green-light release of a product you know has problems working with a brand that makes up over 90% of the discreet GPU market globally.
I’ve worked in software. Deciding to release a product earlier than your previous release cycles that you know has problems with some of the most common hardware used today is a fumble.
At the very least, build a driver-check into the app so that if it finds any driver newer than the 97x.00 range, it can flag a current compatibility issue and recommend the user downgrade their drivers or accept they may have issues.
As it is, DxO’s own PL9 release note literature indicates latest drivers are needed for DeepPrime and AI Mask to work(!)
Apologies for the lengthy reply but when someone says “You just don’t understand, they haven’t done anything wrong”, well there’s plainly some things they didn’t do right, right here.
(Again, I take no joy in this. I want the damn product to work so I can enjoy it, stress free!)
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Have you ever personally managed the release of a major new version of commercial software? I have done that on several occasions. If you had, you would have known the answer to your question. Without getting into a hundred different details, the effort involved goes far beyond just coding and testing.
Most software companies will tend to release software with temporary workarounds, unfinished features, and warnings rather than face the major and costly difficulties resulting from rescheduling a release.
Mark
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Respectfully, I’m not interested in what you have done, or what I have done.
I’m interested in what DxO are doing, and there’s a lot of that which you haven’t addressed. That’s fine, but unless you’re in a position to speak for them (?), I’m not too interested in conjecture with their supporters.
Factually; it’s an earlier yearly release than previous years that doesn’t work with hardware that holds a global majority of users unless you ignore their own literature that recommends the latest drivers and follow their other literature which recommends you downgrade just to run their software.
I’m not surprised people are vexed at this. If you released financial software that way, people would be vexed at that too.
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I am not surprised that people are upset when things don’t work as expected. However, it really doesn’t impact me personally if people complain or make assumptions about things for which they have no personal knowledge or understanding.
My attempt was merely to help people like you understand a bit about how the process works and how issues can occur despite the best efforts of everyone involved.
Clearly, you’re not really interested in understanding what happened. You just want someone to blame for it. No problem. Go for it.
Mark
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My attempt was merely to help people like you understand a bit about how the process works and how issues can occur despite the best efforts of everyone involved.
Since you don’t seem to have a direct line to DxO that gives us new information, I’m not sure this is particularly useful, especially paired with the “I know what you don’t” assumptions.
Yes, they are a different development team to their competitors. Yes, they made things differently. Yes, rescheduling a release could well be difficult and costly.
But also yes: They released something that doesn’t work with drivers for the most popular graphics card brand which have been out since July, put out contradicting release notes saying to use and not use said drivers, and left it at that (most users would assume they don’t need to use old drivers to get their brand new software working).
As you say, I will “go for it”. I’d rather not be in a position where it’s warranted, but here we are.
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“yaka, yfaukon”?, whatever…
I am glad you are annoyed
Well said! It seems that someone is of the opinion that the world should just accept faulty products without voicing their opinion about it.
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You are being really condescending Mark. Take a hike!
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Actually, it’s an AMD setup…
AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, Radeon RX 7600 XT, 32 GB RAM, and while file export and DeepPrime’s performance are fast, PL as a whole is not very “agile”… I can’t say it’s laggy, but I really feel that the latest 8.x versions had a faster interface.
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Although I am not infallible, I generally don’t post things as fact unless I have direct personal knowledge of them. I try not to present guesses or opinion as fact.
Mark
Sorry if it felt like condescension, I was trying to respond to a question which indicated to me a lack of understanding of the large and potentially costly number of issues resulting from cancelling or delaying a major software release. I apologize if it came across as too harsh.
Mark
The discussion now revolves solely around driver issues in Windows. I don’t want to downplay this problem, but it should not be forgotten that PL9 clearly has other issues to address—including under macOS.
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I think the interesting contrast here is that Nvidia is the most valuable company on Earth, with vastly more developer resources than DxO. And yet in the last 2 months, and only considering drivers related to my single GPU, they have released 7 updated packages. It’s great that they are actively trying to fix things, sure, but is anyone in the angry mob throwing a pitchfork at the $4T company for not pausing these releases until “everything is fixed”?
Let’s not lose sight of a few things -
Nobody had to upgrade to PL9. Nobody even had to spend any money on it. I still haven’t. It’s a free trial that doesn’t even require a credit card. I have it installed side by side with PL7. It’s zero risk. When it initially didn’t work for me I could have uninstalled and continued on with my life. But I wanted the extra features so I paid $430 for new hardware.
By most accounts, PL9 is a very significant upgrade in terms of functionality. It should be understood by all that more features, and in particular more complex features = more bugs. Period. This is non-negotiable.
Outside of the very, very small minority of hobbyists who get their social interactions from forums, people mainly visit these places when they have a problem. For all we know, for every one person on here having a problem there are a 1000 “offline” with no issues. This is just human nature. People, on average, are way more motivated to complain than to praise.
I’m amazed there are people here old enough to use a camera and computer yet somehow don’t understand the most obvious concept in the world - early adopters of any new product/technology will always face some (often many) extra bumps in the road. Why do you think it’s called the “bleeding” edge. Come on people, the outrage over any of this isn’t a great look.
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Absolutely agree. The Nvidia driver issue has unfortunately overshadowed other legitimate issues which need to be addressed.
Mark
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Nobody had to upgrade to PL9
This is true, and I still haven’t, thought I want to if the AI masking can be fixed.
It’s a powerful tool which would benefit me greatly. It’s one I’ve found frustratingly lacking in every release till now, where competitors had it years ago.
Because it’s broken, I’m not upgrading to v9, and won’t until it is fixed.
the outrage over any of this isn’t a great look.
Neither are the excuses. PhotoLab and its “optional” (because certain functionality like luminosity masking are not included in the core product) components are not a cheap package and companies are not our friends.
In closing: This shouldn’t be about user vs. user. We’re all here because we (presumably) are invested in the product, and want the best for it and from it. The so called “outrage” is because we’re being sold something expensive that we want, that we waited for while competitors had it… and it doesn’t work (yet).
I’m not asking for people to light their pitchforks, but “understanding how hard it is to release software” only goes so far. Ultimately we’re customers and the company asking for our money needs to step up.
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