The new 16.8 version of Capture One now provides “Enhanced Noise Reduction” similar to what DxO and Lightroom have had for a while. It is a simple checkbox in the Noise tab. Selecting this causes noise reduction to run in the background, which eventually writes a cache file inside the catalogue and then updates the preview. In an earlier thread, @ruthenium posted some comparisons of the effectiveness of this compared with DxO and Lr, but in this thread I am interested in the processing speed of Capture One alone – what hardware is necessary and what might speed it up.
As a first test, I processed several images from my 24 Mpx Canon R3, at high ISOs like 12,800 and 25,600. (Capture One recommends using the traditional noise reduction below 3200.) There is a single slider control; if I’ve understood the release notes correctly moving it above 50% may damage detail and moving it below resynthesises luminance noise, so I left it at 50%, and for the purposes of comparing times here I suggest you do the same.
My results:
1. M5 MacBook Air (the slower of the two processor models): around 20s per image, small CPU use, saturated the GPU.
2. 27″ iMac Retina, Intel i5, Radeon 580: around 5 minutes per image, saturated 3 CPUs, didn’t use the GPU.
Note that the MacBook measurement is with a cold machine and, being fanless, it is likely to thermally throttle if you start processing large batches of images.
I would be curious to see how much faster a Mac mini (adds fans) or Studio is. Windows users also feel free to piggyback on this thread and post your measurements, although I have no personal interest.
16" MacBook Pro, M5-Pro, 48GB, 1TB, running on battery with automatic energy mode.
100 Nikon Z9 High Efficiency Lossless Raw files @ ISO 3200 = 18:12 total time (10.9 seconds per image)
(Capture One estimated a 17 minute total time after running the first image of the group)
Battery went from 80% at start of batch to 60% upon completion with the display turned on during the run.
Relatively little fan noise with the fans running in a range of 2500-3000 rpm, which was quieter than our refrigerator's compressor from the next room.
Memory Pressure ranged from 10-11%, GPU's ran at 90-92%, with only ~5% CPU use.
My Capture One catalog backup only grew by 14MB as the result of running Enhanced Denoise on these 100 images.
I suspect that the image and preview cache files grew as the result of this processing, but I didn't record their sizes before the run so don't have measurable size changes in these files.
Ryzen 6900HX (laptop) with Radeon iGPU (capped at 35W) took several minutes (up to 10 or 12) to process 50mp file (Sony A1).
Same laptop but with dGPU RTX 3070Ti took around 2-3 minutes to process the same. Quality is comparable to Topaz but overall is much much slower(
