Re: new computer or new video card needed?
- From: Colin_D <nospam@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 10:37:32 +1200
louise wrote:
I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm shooting in RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial adjustments to the raw image and then saving it as a tiff. I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.
So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open. And my computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very very slowly, pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are previewed....slowly. It is only slightly better if I close Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough to be frustrating for any quantity of work.
I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow and I am constantly waiting for large files to open and to adjust to changes. I find the transition from Capture NX to opening the tiff in CS3 to be extremely slow.
I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or whether it is simply that my graphics card isn't up to the tasks I am now presenting to it. Here are the specs:
P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large seagate hard drive with plenty of space.
The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with 128 meg of memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E Deluxe motherboard.
Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is the the video card the main bottleneck? If the video card is the bottleneck, do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of ram or do I get a regular PCI card and not use the AGP slot at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What specs should I look for in a card?
I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the slowness for another year when I will feel more ready to buy a new computer. But if not....then it will have to be sooner.
Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.
TIA
Louise
Forget the video card, it's not the problem here. And a 3.2GHz P4 with 2 gigs of ram should be enough to handle most things. Does your hard drive thrash a lot while you're working? If so, it's a sure sign that the memory, all 2 gigs of it, is full enough that the paging, or swap, file is being used to hold the overflow from memory.
CS3, like all PS software can be a memory hog. Go into Preferences and find out how much memory it is reserving for files - usually about half of available memory, so that can chew up about a gig for you, leaving only a gig for all the other programs and data you have loaded. You can reduce the amount reserved, depending on what you want PS3 to do. If you only open one image file at a time in PS, then it's senseless to reserve a gig just for that. I'd reduce it to maybe 250k up to 500k max, freeing another half a gig or more.
The other main memory user could be Capture, if it holds all your images in memory. I don't know that it does, and it shouldn't, but check for that. A card full of raw images all converted into memory space can soak up a lot of memory. A hundred images at 18 MB apiece is 1800 MB, or 1.8 GB. If that's happening, write them to disk and close Capture before proceeding.
You can use Task manager (Ctrl-Alt-delete) to see your memory usage. Have that running minimized when you load up the various programs, and you may get an idea of what is doing the memory hogging. Task manager puts a small green bar graph at the bottom right of your screen. Dull green is available memory, bright green is used memory. Shows you at a glance how much memory is being used at any time.
Colin D.
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