Nvidia Ampere 3*** series - relevant?

[Ben Rubinstein]

Are the new Nvidia Ampere 3*** series video cards relevant to us as photographers? The benchmarking for photoshop or lightroom seems to prove not.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Photoshop---NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-3090-Performance-1891/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Lightroom-Classic---NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-3090-Performance-1893/

I wonder whether there will be any difference for Capture One?

[Joe Towner]

Given some of the build quality issues with the 3xxx cards, I wouldn't go near one for a bit.  For photographers, the likelihood you're actually maxing out a 2xxx series card is just not possible.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Given some of the build quality issues with the 3xxx cards, I wouldn't go near one for a bit.  For photographers, the likelihood you're actually maxing out a 2xxx series card is just not possible.

Can you share any reports?

I'm going to be outputting 25000 tiff's at a time, outputting in C1 is all GPU so I'm looking for the best solution possible as the computer is going to be doing other stuff as well such as building previews for a further 25K files while the previous catalog processes out.

[Joe Towner]

Check this - https://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-instability-traced-to-capacitors-27640107/

I would think that 25,000 tiffs would have other issues before GPU limits hit it.  Storage bandwidth would be a bigger concern - it's the bottleneck you'll be fighting.  Whats the image size in & out look like?  What are you currently doing this with, or is it a new project?

[Ben Rubinstein]

Check this - https://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-instability-traced-to-capacitors-27640107/

I would think that 25,000 tiffs would have other issues before GPU limits hit it.  Storage bandwidth would be a bigger concern - it's the bottleneck you'll be fighting.  Whats the image size in & out look like?  What are you currently doing this with, or is it a new project?

I'm running 6 2tb SSD's in RAID 0 to process. I won't have the processor lanes to use the required number of NVMe drives but can match speed using regular SSD's with the use of raid 0. All the original data is on the clients servers of course. The images are Leaf II-8, Nikon D800e and A7rIII raw files (42/40/81mb average). They will be outputted as TIFF 8 Bit. 25000 of the largest of those is only about 2TB at a time. The total of the project is 1.6 million raw files which require checking, applying styles and outputting. I'm capping at 25K per C1 catalog as per Phase One's own advice dating back to 2017, I don't know if things are different now, I sure hope they are but I can't count on it until I see it in black and white. What is useful is that I can output one catalog of 25K images to tiff (GPU) while building a catalog of 25K new images (CPU) simultaneously and hopefully this way overcome much of the catalog size limitation.

This is for a proposed project to a client that I've been working hard on selling them.

[JaapD]

Output one catalog of 25K images to tiff (GPU) while building a catalog of 25K new images (CPU) simultaneously? => I’d take two PC’s for that, one without expensive GPU for the ‘prepping’ and another PC with a RTX3090 (or a Titan RTX if you want to step away from the 30 series) for the ‘processing’. Reason for this is that the ‘processing’ activity is highly GPU-CPU-I/O task (incl. memory caching) driven and I would not interfere these multi tasking processes by even more processes; the ‘prepping’ through the same CPU and I/O (and OS).

Cheers,
Jaap.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Output one catalog of 25K images to tiff (GPU) while building a catalog of 25K new images (CPU) simultaneously? => I’d take two PC’s for that, one without expensive GPU for the ‘prepping’ and another PC with a RTX3090 (or a Titan RTX if you want to step away from the 30 series) for the ‘processing’. Reason for this is that the ‘processing’ activity is highly GPU-CPU-I/O task (incl. memory caching) driven and I would not interfere these multi tasking processes by even more processes; the ‘prepping’ through the same CPU and I/O (and OS).

Cheers,
Jaap.

I'm going to start with one PC and then buy another if I find that I'm not running fast enough. I can't test any of this unfortunately until I have the contract and can afford the hardware.

That said from my testing, processing in C1 is vast majority GPU, not a huge processor drain at all. Whereas catalog/thumbnail build is exactly the opposite. That's why I was thinking of running both in tandem.

[DP]

Are the new Nvidia Ampere 3*** series video cards relevant to us as photographers? The benchmarking for photoshop or lightroom seems to prove not.

us are not all using LR and PS to start with ... there are applications & plugins that use GPU more than others...

[Ben Rubinstein]

us are not all using LR and PS to start with ... there are applications & plugins that use GPU more than others...

Hence my question. I'd love to know about Capture One in particular.

[Ben Rubinstein]

I can sort of answer this now, I bought a Lenovo Legion 5 this week. It has a GTX 1650 Ti graphics card. I've been running some extensive testing on Capture One and have been unable to get the GPU to peak over 40% whether on import, processing or output. So yeah, no need to waste the cash on this high end stuff for C1 use as far as I can see. These were albeit 36 megapixel files but I doubt even the 60 megapixel files of the a7r4 will make a lot of difference. Perhaps if you're maxing out adjustment layers?