New PC build for Affinity Photo

[Lighthunter]

Hello, this is my first post in this forum.

I recently purchased a new high resolution camera and my PC is showing its age. It's still usable but I would like it to be snappier when editing a lot of images at once.

My current PC specs:

- Intel i5 6600 (4 cores, 4 threads)

- 2 x 8GB Ram (2400ghz)

- ATI Radeon RX 460 4GB GPU

- Samsung EVO 860 SSD

 

My new system might be:

- AMD Ryzen 7 3700x (8 cores, 16 threads)

- 2 x 8GB Ram (3200ghz)

- Keep my ATI Radeon GPU

- Samsung EVO 970 plus m.2 SSD

 

I have a few questions specifically for using Affinity Photo:

1) Will I see a significant benefit of the 8-core CPU over e.g. a cheaper 6-core CPU (Ryzen 5 3600)?

2) Will my GPU bottle neck my system? Or in other words, would I benefit in any way from a better GPU?

3) I want to replace my 2400ghz ram with 3200ghz version. Will there be a noticeable performance boost or would you rather keep the 2400ghz ram?

 

Some words around what I do with Affinity Photo. I process 30mp raw images in 16 bit and typically apply 5-10 layers with custom LUTs and other corrections. I sometimes stitch panoramas with 2 to 6 of such 30mp images. I use batch jobs a lot to apply certain macros to a lot of images.

The batch processing screen struggles to load multiple images (50+) and it seems to crash AP but eventually loads them.

Most annoying is to merge visible layers which seems to take too long (sometimes 30 seconds).

So overall, I want to invest in new hardware and would like to understand which components would provide the biggest performance boost.

Thanks

Edited December 9, 2019 by Lighthunter

[Lee D]

We have an FAQ available that covers having a multiple core processor in your system as our app is designed to use the CPU more. However the GPU is used for drawing/rendering on screen and for panning and zooming.

Another user with a AMD Ryzen reported his findings here as we don't have one available to test with at this time.