Performance Increase - Best Bang for the Buck?

[eforer]

definitely don't distribute your work as jpegs. Its lossy compression and I for one would be pissed if I bought something like what your selling and the files were Jpegs.

 

[dclet]

It's a matter of target audience, or how he plans on marketing them....plenty of room for everyone and everything

It's only my opinion as a designer, give me big, quality files, that way I can manipulate them with confidence.

 

[Bogie]

I -hate- the artifacts that you get with jpegs.

My new Canon, even with the compression set to "highest quality" drops crap in... Which means that I can do about a 24x36 with it.

The same as I could do with the 3 megapixel one that I gave to the Teenager From Hell.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Interesting. So you would prefer a TIF? What about if the TIF were in RGB rather than CMYK?

Why then do most stock photography collections use JPG as their standard? This is what Fotosearch.com provides in the way of information about it:

File Compression
When you purchase an image from Fotosearch, that image will be delivered to you in a compressed format. The file size listed for the image may be 10 or 28MB but the file that you download will be approximately 10% of that size. After you save the file in an uncompressed format, it will expand to the listed size.
Most of our vendors offer their images in JPEG format. When using JPEG images no image degradation is noticeable after a single compression/decompression cycle. However, further compression(s) to and from the JPEG format will degrade the image quality to an extent that eventually it will become visible. To retain maximum quality in these images simply avoid re-saving the image in JPEG format and use uncompressed formats such as TIFF or EPS or a loss-less compression format such as TIFF with LZW compression.

 

[dclet]

What about if the TIF were in RGB rather than CMYK

That's fine.....I would prefer that over .jpg

Fotosearch - Is that Download Only?? I haven't tried them...
I think Istock is all .jpg too....

I have several commercial CD's, DVD's with nothing but .tifs...

 

[Fred Weiss]

One more question ...

My computer guy is telling me that I would be better off to use PC3200 RAM rather than the PC6400 RAM offered as an upgrade option at TigerDirect. He says that although the clock speed of the PC6400 is faster, the latency is slower and that his understanding is that the PC3200 will actually perform faster as a result.

So I need some second opinions on this issue.

 

[bullcrew]

One more question ...

My computer guy is telling me that I would be better off to use PC3200 RAM rather than the PC6400 RAM offered as an upgrade option at TigerDirect. He says that although the clock speed of the PC6400 is faster, the latency is slower and that his understanding is that the PC3200 will actually perform faster as a result.

So I need some second opinions on this issue.

Depends on the ram, mine is 6400 and its timings are 4;4;4;15;42 and can be tightened if needed. If that were the case Id have 3200 but its not. You can adjust (good quality) memory some either slacken or tighten the latencys up.
Heres what I run and it hands me my @$$ its so fast. OCZ2P800R22GK Its a 2pk of 1 gb ram, with heat dissapation sheilds on them to help coolthem off. They are warrantied for 2.2volts and latency is 4;4;4;15;42 and that can be adjusted. Its a quality product period!!! And its pc6400 ddr2.

depending on your board theres an even faster ram than I have its a 670 or something, expensive and between the 2 wasnt worth me paying the extra. Dont think I went cheap I didnt and i could have spent for that ram I opted not too just because this this is built to the gills for Horse Power.

 

[Fred Weiss]

As promised, here is a report on comparative times with the new machine.

The old computer times were performed on a P4 with 1 GB of RAM using Filter Forge as a plugin for Photoshop CS2. The new computer is an Intel Quad Core 2.4 GHz with 4 GB of DDR2 PC6400 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card.

Basically what I'm seeing is a reduction by half of both the previewing and rendering times. This is nowhere close to the improvement I was hoping for. I now have a computer with 4 times the processing power, 4 times the ram, 3 times the ram speed, three times the bus speed ... yet it is only performing at double the previous speed. The operations being timed are largely or totally independent of any disk operations and the new machine also has a dedicated 80 GB 7200 hard drive being used as a Photoshop scratch disk.

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome that might serve to improve performance or whether this is all I should expect. Bios appears to be setup correctly and the OS is Windows XP Pro SP2 for compatibility issues with current versions of too much of my software and hardware.

 

[Replicator]

I will say this . . . Double speeds aren't bad . . . !

The more crap that ends up on that machine, the slower it will become until finally,

it's right back to the speed you were at before . . . !

 

[Bogie]

Yeah - did the new one come with any crapware installed?

Pull off any antivirus (don't use it for internet or downloading...) stuff, and the rest of that sort of thing... Don't load anything that isn't specifically required.

 

[dclet]

Is dual core enabled in filter forge?
Did you load the drivers that came with the motherboard or did you let windows do that.

Make sure all your drivers are up to date.

Like I said earlier Filter Forge is a pig... It does some really nice things but needs ALOT of machine...

 

[Checkers]

Hey Fred,

Sometimes you can make adjustments to photoshop (and windowz) to mazimize memory usage and increase performance.

Did you configure photoshop to make use of the extra memory and scratch disks/hard drives?

Do you have other programs are running in the background? You can go to the task manager to see what else is running. I don't know if it's still true, but some programs, like antivirus monitors can be real resource hogs. If you have a lot of non-essential programs running in th ebackground, terminate them.

Checkers

 

[jiarby]

Fred,

I don't agree that you have 4x the processing power..

An Intel 841 is 3.2ghz single core with 2mb dedicated (NOT SHARED) L2cache.

The quad proc you have is a slower clock speed, with SHARED cache. Even though there are 4 of them on the core it is not a 1:1 relationship compared to the old performance.

Additionally you have to factor that your application may not be multithreading efficiently to keep all 4 procs glowing. Many apps still just single-thread so buying multi-core chips doesn't increase performance.

I think that your 100% increase in pewrformance should be within expectations, and is probably very good!

Turn on some perfmon counters to watch the proc cores and see what they are doing during a rendering operation.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Yeah - did the new one come with any crapware installed?

Pull off any antivirus (don't use it for internet or downloading...) stuff, and the rest of that sort of thing... Don't load anything that isn't specifically required.

Good logic except I sit at this machine all day and receive email and monitor Signs 101 while I work ... so foregoing anti-virus software is not an option. Other software is utilized doing other chores as well. The point is that this is pretty much the same setup as was on the old machine, so my logic is that it should be running faster.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Is dual core enabled in filter forge?
Did you load the drivers that came with the motherboard or did you let windows do that.

Make sure all your drivers are up to date.

Like I said earlier Filter Forge is a pig... It does some really nice things but needs ALOT of machine...

Yes multi-core is enabled in Filter Forge.

My contractor setup the machine as far as building it and loading Windows XP. I will ask him when he comes in next week to try to tune it up better.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Photoshop question for you tech wizards.

My new machine has 4 GB of RAM installed which Windows XP sees 3.25 GB of. Photoshop, however reports only 1.757 GB is available and, at it's default setting of 55% usage by Photoshop will only then be using 966 MB of the RAM.

Is this lower reading of available memory due to other resources in use? I thought that was why Photoshop was setup to only take a portion of the memory ... to allow for that.

 

[jayhawksigns]

3-3.5GB is all 32-bit version of windows will ever see. And I don't have an explanation for why Photoshop sees what it does, mine is that way, an answer to that would be nice.

Although its too late now, I don't think you could of used PC3200 ram in this computer, that is the old DDR speed, your new computer uses DDR2. Oh well.


Also, if someone could come up with a generic image we could render, I would run the file through FF on my rig to see how a higher end AMD system handles the work.

 

[jiarby]

edit your boot.ini to enable the /3gb switch. It will allocate 3gb to applications rather than 2gb. Xp splits the ram between kernel & applications. The 3gb switch makes it 1gb for Kernel & 3gb for apps

/3GB

 

[Fred Weiss]

edit your boot.ini to enable the /3gb switch. It will allocate 3gb to applications rather than 2gb. Xp splits the ram between kernel & applications. The 3gb switch makes it 1gb for Kernel & 3gb for apps

/3GB

I'm not finding a file named boot.ini anywhere on my C drive. My search included all subfolders and hidden files. Can you give me the location of this file or if the name is different in any way?

 

[jayhawksigns]

In an Explorer window go to Tools and select Folder Options. Under the View tab, select "Show hidden files and folders" and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files"

Then you can see the boot.ini in the c:\ folder. Be sure to set those properties back to normal after you are finished editting them.