I’ve just been using PL 6 on my Win10 tower and have noticed a crazy slowdown compared to the past. Everything seems very unresponsive. E.g. when adjusting exposure compensation it can take 15 sec. for the adjustment to display on the screen. When editing with no exports running it could take more than a minute to display the crop screen or Local Adjustments screen. It’s very frustrating.
Also exporting with DeepPrime XD can take 6 or 7 min. per image. I don’t recall how long it took before (I think less than 3 min.) but it was nowhere near that long. CPU time is 100%, editing is so slow as to be impossible, and other applications such as Evernote are so unresponsive as to be useless (e.g. over a minute to echo a keystroke).
The machine has an Intel i5-7400 3.6 GHz processor, 4 cores, 6 MB cache with 16 GB DDR4-2400 memory, and a Radeon R7 450 FH graphics card with 4 GB running Win 10. The cache is on an SSD and there’s ~2.5 TB free on the drive. Everything else seems fine and no other applications are having problems.
During a single export using DeepPrime XD noise reduction Photolab used anywhere from 86% to 98% CPU with most of the time over 94%. (Previously I just looked at the task manager icon and it looked like 100%.) Nothing else was taking more than 1%. Total memory for Photolab while it was exporting was 3.1 GB which dropped to 1.7 GB when it finished. Firefox was running when I started the export but it crashed apparently because Photolab was using so much CPU time which had happened before with Photolab but not otherwise. Evernote was useless: it didn’t respond to even one keystroke during the export. There were no other apps running. Previously to try and speed up exports I shut down a lot of things in the system tray which didn’t help. The export took 5:36.
Photolab has never used the graphics card because it’s too under powered. I’d like to upgrade but to be worthwhile that would take a new PSU which would take a new case and so new computer.
The database is on my E: internal data drive which is an SSD. The images are on a USB drive. The cache is on the E: drive too. Maximum simultaneous exports is 2. OpenCL is not enabled. When I try to enable it I’m informed that my graphics card is slower than my CPU and enabling it may decrease performance. Does that sound right? Anything else to look at?
It’s the overall age of your computer plus an unusable GPU.
Without a reasonably recent GPU, DxO is forced to use your CPU only which, as you’ve found, is a well known and predictable recipe for horrible performance.
“Good news” is that a modern GPU card can be had for around $200 (or less). Think of an Nvidia 1060 or that generation. My travel computer has a 7th gen mobile processor plus an on-board 1050ti gpu. Deep Prime XD exports of 30mb raw files run in the 7-10 second range.
A 1060 gpu card will typically pull around 120 watts at max, which is approx. double what your old AMD card pulls. If your power supply has any margin left, this is probably the best/economical upgrade available to you.
The GPU is only used by DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD. Any other performance issues, like his reference to the adjustment of exposure compensation, have nothing to do with his graphic card’s GPU.
I suggest reading this post and everything after it:
…but this could be a CPU problem or another chip-based component failing (graphics card, motherboard chipset, RAM…). Run something like HWMonitor to see what your temperatures are while PhotoLab is running slow. If the processor gets too hot, it will throttle down to low performance. You might need to reassemble the CPU-heatsink-fan stack, replace something, or clean your computer (carefully).
I disabled my ESET AV real-time and intrusion protection and tried again. The time was 5:11, 25 sec. better. I then enabled protection and excluded monitoring of processes DxO.PhotoLab.exe and DxO.PhotoLab.ProcessingCore.exe and tested again. This time it took 5:06. That’s 30 sec. better but still not acceptable.
I uninstalled DxO, reinstalled, and tried again: the time was 5:11 so no benefit.
I’d love to get an Nvidia 1060 card but I’m not sure if I have the power. My PSU is 250W and I don’t see any replacements the same size that are more powerful. I have 2 internal SSDs and an internal HDD. It’s not clear if I have adequate margin, and I’m reluctant to push the envelope since this is my primary PC and I need reliability. I’ll look into this further.
I can’t provide exact information about my previous experience because I didn’t take notes. All I can say is that current 5 to 6 min. time for DeepPRIME XD export is so bad that I wouldn’t have tolerated it. I’ve always edited while exporting and so the same is true there too. Sorry I don’t have more accurate information.
I again tested editing while exporting and found the editor and other applications running were still unresponsive.
I’ve had bad experiences with Windows Repair and worse with System Restore and will never use them again. I think that’s ok: everything else is working fine so this is likely not a problem with Windows updates. However I ran the dism commands and no problems were reported. Sfc found and repaired some file permission issues but when I tested again there was no difference.
I tried HWMonitor and found that it slowed the export a lot: I stopped it after 7:30 elapsed time and it was maybe 2/3rd through. The Package temperature increased from around 48 C to around 68 C. I have no idea if this indicates a problem or not.
DeepPRIME XD processing time in a PC is all about the graphic card’s GPU. I have a newer and more powerful i7 computer with 24gb of ram and an SSD drive.
When I ran a DeepPRIME XD export using the CPU only on a Nikon Z fc 21mp raw image with only startup edits applied, it took 5 minutes and 54 seconds to complete. When I ran the same export a second time using my Nvidia GTX 1050Ti which is a minimally acceptable card, processing an export using DeepPRIME XD took 35 seconds which is 1/10 the time.
The time it took for you to export a file with using your CPU only is consistent with my more powerful computer. Your graphics card, the Radeon R7 450, is a very old and low end card and is not supported for DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD processing . My GTX 1050 TI which is a minimum card to use these days has 271% of the relative processing power of your card. That is why your processing is so slow.
I am sorry to tell you that your graphics card is just not up to the task. The problem is not PhotoLab 6. You will probably run into similar processing issues running the AI based features of other software like Topaz products and Photoshop. In fact Photoshop won’t even run some AI features if you don’t have a supported card.
Your only solution to speeding up the processing of DeepPRIME XD on your computer is to upgrade your graphics card and most likely your power supply as well. A midrange card with an appropriate power supply should process your DeepPRIME XD exports in 10 to 15 seconds and probably even faster depending on the card.
The GTX 1060 with 6 GB of onboard memory would certainly be a very noticeable improvement over my GTX 1050 Ti, but it is still just an acceptable lower end card. I suspect DeepPRIME XD processing would probably take between 15 and 20 seconds per image or longer depending on the size of the raw files.
Do you’ve enough free disk space?
I had a slow working pc a few weeks ago. Not specific PL. The 250GB C drive was full which I couldn’t believe. I ran CHKDSK /f and then the C drive was ok again and the performance of the pc too. It happened twice to me and I still don’t know what caused that.
Normally, things don’t “just change” on a computer. Please try to remember if the change occurred after an application or OS update, a malware infection, some Windows or hardware maintenance operation or whatever could have changed between “the past” and “now”.