My Win7 desktop system is 5 years old. It's still adequate for Photoshop, but I spend a lot of time waiting for ACR conversions. So I bought a new system. The new system is way more powerful than the old one. But I'm discovering that it is not much faster, and in some tests is actually slower when doing ACR conversions.
This has me baffled, so I'm asking for help. Please review the following and offer comments on my testing procedure, or suggestions for other things to look at.
Test procedure: I made 10 duplicates of a raw file (Canon 5D3). Then I made several tests, each with a different set of ACR adjustments appled to all copies. From Bridge I would "Load files into Photoshop layers", and measure the time it took. Only Bridge and Photoshop were loaded during the tests.
I can't see any other Windows services stealing CPU time. Using Task Manager to monitor a test, I see the old system peaking at 88% CPU usage, while the new system peaks at only 30%.
The following is a table of my results.
http://kellyphoto.smugmug.com/photos/i-XsqKXSf/0/O/i-XsqKXSf.jpgNote the incremental times for each separate adjustment type, but most important, note the times for noise reduction and sharpening.
Old System: I5 model 750 4 core processor, 8gb memory, 2 basic 7200rpm hard drives.
New System: I7 model 5820, 6 core processor, 16bg memory, 1 SSD and 1 7200rpm hard drive.
The systems have different graphics cards, but I've determined that the GPU has no impact on ACR conversions. I can turn GPU on and off inside Photoshop and I get the same results.
I've also run two Photoshop benchmarks I find via Google. Those tests do show significant differences between the systems. But those tests all involve running various filters via an action, or generating huge images that exceed available memory to test the scratch/swap file function. None of them test ACR conversion.