Photoshop has historically not been GPU limited, so when I was building my PC a few years ago I opted for a top of the line CPU Core i9, 32G or RAM, NVMe boot drive (mounted to the MB) and multiple good SSDs as primary drives. However, at the time the crypto craze was in full swing and I did not feel like paying scalper prices for a GPU so I opted for a modest Geforce 1060, which has served me well... until now.
The the recent update of ACR to an AI based denoise model I am seeing fairly painfully slow performance, 2-3 minutes per 24 Mpx Nikon raw file. Adobe explicitly calls out the new NR as very GPU intensive so I am thinking about spending $400 or less on a better GPU card. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/04/18/denoise-demystified
The explicitly recommend "On Windows, use GPUs with ML acceleration hardware, such as NVIDIA RTX with TensorCores". They also suggest getting as much memory as you can afford.
The only Nvidia cards that fit my budget are the 3060 Ti and 3060. The 3060 Ti nominally performs better than than the 3060 due to its 256 bit memory bus, but comes with only 8G memory vs 12G for the 3060. Since many games are not that memory hungry, if I were to go with a 3060 series I would opt for a 3060 over 3060 Ti. The 3070 series is out of my price range.
On the Radeon side I can get a refurb RTX 6700 XT for about the same price as a new 3060. On gaming benchmarks the 6700 XT outperforms the 3060 by a wide benchmark so that seems to be a slam dunk choice.
Am I missing something in the comparison that could make me prefer the Geforce 3060 over the RTX 6700 XT?
Last but not least, each of these cards comes from a bewildering array of suppliers, at a broad range of price points. The main differences I see are 2-fan vs 3-fan options and small differences in base and boost clock speeds. Are there any suggestions on particular manufacturers to stay away from, or specific additional specs to pay attention to?
UPDATE:
Read up a bit more. Traditional gaming bechmarks can be deceiving for this particular case. Apparently the Nvidia Tensor cores outperform the Radeon GPUs on machine learning tasks by a wide margin, which is probably why Adobe explicitly calls them out in their recommendations. I guess I will be looking for a used 3070 in the low $400s range.
UPDATE 2:
Numerous used 3070s under $400 at the everything store, including some well reviewed ones.
mcbroomf wrote:
The article Eric Chan wrote about Denoise says that they used Tensor cores on Nvidia cards. The 3060 Ti has 152 Tensor cores vs 112 for the 3060.
and? the Ti has more cores than the 3060 thats why the refere to it as the Ti you keep on adding money to it it will be more powerful.
Ti versions are usually in between one full version and the next, so a 3070 Ti is between a 3070 and a 3080. Sometimes the Ti version is at the top, so better than any previous version. Nvidia has been particularly bogus with the 40 series. They tried to foist the a lower RAM and smaller bus version of the 4080 as a lower 4080 at $900, but people complained so loudly that nVidia pulled the release entirely in 2022 and released it in 2023 as the 4070 Ti for $100 less, though without an FE it's always more than that.
I have the same 1060 and I am now having the same issues. I turned off "Use Graphic Processor" which speeded things up quite a bit. However I am still planning to buy a new graphics card. My son (an IT professional) thinks I should wait for the upcoming 4060 card.
Jim
The PS AI denoise is at least 5x slower than Topaz. If you plan on sticking with Topaz you will be fine. If you attempt to utilize the new PS denoise you will find your old GPU lacking. My GeForce 1060 takes between 5 and 9 minutes to process 4-5 24 Mpx images.
Bacalhau wrote:
yes, I do have the Adobe subscription so always updated - but even with Topaz Denoise or DxO PL5 I have no issues
jmmaher wrote:
I have the same 1060 and I am now having the same issues. I turned off "Use Graphic Processor" which speeded things up quite a bit. However I am still planning to buy a new graphics card. My son (an IT professional) thinks I should wait for the upcoming 4060 card.
Jim
That will likely set you back the average price of a mid range laptop. AI has done to Nvidia GPU prices what Bitcoin and Ether did to them in 2020. Fortunately the decimation for bitcoin prices means that there are MANY 30 series used GPUs floating around at pretty attractive prices
jmmaher wrote:
I turned off "Use Graphic Processor" which speeded things up quite a bit.
Jim
Not what I see. Two test files from Nikon Z6 (24Mpx each)
No GPU: 2:14
1060 GPU: 2:14
3070 GPU: 0:21
So roughly 7x faster.
On a side note, that MSI 3070 Gaming Trio Z is MOSTROUSLY large. It is 3 PCI slots wide and 12" long, barely fit inside my full size case. It also takes 8 pins of power from the supply, thank god I had preserved all the extra power cables from my 650W power supply. I told myself "I am never going to need something that large" and lo and behold I do
P.S. The MSI 3070 Gaming Trio Z is incredibly quiet. One YT review said so but I found it hard to believe, yet you can barely hear it with the case open.
P.P.S The studio driver is even faster: 15 seconds with the same above two images vs 21s with the game driver.
EB-1 wrote:
It's actually larger than my 4070 Ti. Crazy.
EBH
Yeah, you should see what the EVGA FTW3 Ultra is like.
However these are 3-fan cards, I wanted a 3-fan one so the fans don't need to run as hard
Another 32G of RAM arriving tomorrow. With the semiconductor glut that is rapidly developing SSD prices should come down to the point where I can buy a couple more SSD and retain the the HDDs only for internal redundancy (I back up nightly from the SSDs to the HDDs).
I only have space for exactly 3 slots, not 3.5 or whatever is common for the larger cards. Otherwise I might have gone for the 4090. My old 3060Ti only uses two slots and has two fans, so it is being repurposed for a smaller build and case. That must be an old video before the 40 series. EVGA is out of the video card business anyways.
