Useful tweaks for Windows 10

[Bololoco]

I've got an old HP elitebook 8470p with an i5 3320m cpu and 12gb of 1333mhz ram. It's been good for a long time but i've recently started stitching together large panoramas. I currently have one going on in the background that contains over 60 pictures, each 20mb in size and have even done larger ones than that but it's bringing my computer to its knees.

However, when I look at the CPU meter in the task manager, it shows that my CPU is generally running between 1% and 5%, so to my reckoning, it could be working a lot harder on the task at hand.

Anyway, what i'd like to know is what tweaks I can make underneath the hood to improve my computer's performance in relation to Affinity Photo?

It's likely that I will upgrade my computer at some point but i'd like to see what extra mileage I can get from it before my lappy gets sent to a museum.

[walt.farrell]

It could be doing things that would be speeded up by a better GPU, or it could be doing things that would be speeded up by having significantly more memory. Of course, you can't upgrade the GPU. And that laptop only goes up to 16GB of memory; the extra 4GB you can get probably won't help much.

[Bololoco]

Thanks for answering Walt, although i'm looking to see if there are any specific tweaks I can make to the OS.

Do you have any suggestions? Perhaps some alterations to the registry or some other such fundamental alterations

[walt.farrell]

I doubt there's anything you can do, to either the software (OS) or the hardware.

[Bololoco]

Hmm, I remember back in the days of Windows XP that I reformatted my computer and increased the kernel size in the process, which helped speed up file transfer rates (at the cost of wasting space on my hard drive), but this really helped in playing with audio samples. I think I may have had 128 or 256mb of ram at the time. I also made a few changes to the registry, although I think windows OS is leaps ahead of that old monster, so was rather hoping that there'd be some similar changes I could make to my current laptop.

Surely the fact that Affinity only uses around 5% of the CPU means that I can access more!

Must I really go back to having a desktop and a dedicated graphics card?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Bololoco said:

Surely the fact that Affinity only uses around 5% of the CPU means that I can access more!

It means that your CPU is not the bottleneck. That probably means that your memory is the bottleneck, or the process of paging/swapping memory to your file system.

[Bololoco]

I know that the ddr3 ram runs at 1333mhz, which is slow comparing it to a fast ddr5 ram but does that mean that faster ram is only going to be 3-4 times faster or is modern ram more efficient in ways that clock speed doesn't equate?

[Bololoco]

Also, if I had a computer with 4 or more ram slots, (compared to my current 2 slots), would that mean the overall ram speed is doubled?

[walt.farrell]

It's probably not as much about the ram speed as the quantity. Your panorama person will, I think, require a large amount of virtual memory. The physical memory must be shared among all the processes that are running, and when the risk of the required virtual memory exceed the amount of physical memory, the system must swap some of the contents of physical memory to disk to make it available. That swapping is I/O intensive, and may be attributed to the system rather than the application, and helps reduce the amount of CPU the application can use.

[Bololoco]

Ok, so to get the most out of this particular laptop, I should max out the ram? Then I shall have to see about finding another 8gb stick and seeing what difference that makes, although as you've previously said, probably not a lot, although I imagine it will do something.

When I do upgrade, would a server pc be beneficial? I am reading that the motherboards on these can house upwards of 28 ram slots. That's probably more ram than i'd like to spend money on but maybe I can find something with 8 slots. I'd really like a machine that can stitch a few hundred pics together in a couple of hours or less.

I've attached some panoramas for you to look at. Taken on a 45mm lens, which is the equivalent to a 90mm lens (micro four thirds camera user here). I've recently bought quite a nice russian 500mm mirror lens which is equivalent to 1000mm, so i'm wanting to go into even more detail, hence me wanting my computer to do the job in a reasonable time frame.

These panoramas aren't the biggest i've done either.....that was an 8gb affphoto file when I only had 8gb of ram....it made my computer unusable for 2 days!

And despite it slowing things down to a crawl, i've kinda become obsessed with large panoramas. So much more fun than taking a single pic.

Anyway, thanks for the reply. I didn't think it was useful at first but now I think you're spot on.

[ashf]

You have SSD installed in your laptop, don't you?
if not, it's not usable in the current era.

[walt.farrell]

Replacing the HDD with an SSD would be a good idea, @ashf. And that's not all that expensive to do. And it's relatively simple.

@Bololoco: you mentioned some of your panoramas have 60 images, each 20MB. What kind of images are these? 

 

[Bololoco]

Whatever images I photograph whilst walking the dog.

I think I can put in a 480gb ssd but no larger. Sadly, I can't use nvme drives, although I haven't looked into nvme via the pmcia slot. In fact, I don't know if that's even possible.

[ashf]

3 minutes ago, Bololoco said:

Whatever images I photograph whilst walking the dog.

I think I can put in a 480gb ssd but no larger. Sadly, I can't use nvme drives, although I haven't looked into nvme via the pmcia slot. In fact, I don't know if that's even possible.

I think your laptop has only PCIe 1.1 x 1 slot.  not worth to try installing NVMe card.
It's slower than SATA.

[Pšenda]

12 hours ago, Bololoco said:

Surely the fact that Affinity only uses around 5% of the CPU means that I can access more!

If only 5% of the CPU is being used, it's obvious that it's rubbing/bottleneck somewhere else:
- is GPU used for calculations? What is its power/load?(screenshot?) In the application settings, you can try to turn off HW acceleration - which, paradoxically, can slow it down.
- Is all RAM used? How do you use it (screenshot?) So it can be saved to disk, which is many times slower than access to RAM. What is its use? (screenshot?)
- do you have any memory/disk usage restrictions in the application Preferences? (screenshot?)

[walt.farrell]

11 hours ago, Bololoco said:

Whatever images I photograph whilst walking the dog.

RAW? Or JPG or TIFF?

RGB/8 or RGB/16 or RGB/32?

[Bololoco]

ha ha, I thought you might want to know what kind of photography I was most interested in.

I generally shoot RAW, then render to JPG. I will start using TIFF's at some point but currently keeping the files as small as necessary, so JPG is fine.

[walt.farrell]

10 minutes ago, Bololoco said:

I generally shoot RAW, then render to JPG

Can you share one of the files you're adding into your panorama?

[Bololoco]

9 hours ago, Pšenda said:

If only 5% of the CPU is being used, it's obvious that it's rubbing/bottleneck somewhere else:
- is GPU used for calculations? What is its power/load?(screenshot?) In the application settings, you can try to turn off HW acceleration - which, paradoxically, can slow it down.
- Is all RAM used? How do you use it (screenshot?) So it can be saved to disk, which is many times slower than access to RAM. What is its use? (screenshot?)
- do you have any memory/disk usage restrictions in the application Preferences? (screenshot?)

I don't think the GPU is used for anything other than putting the pictures on the screen. It's an old laptop and doesn't have any special graphics capabilities.

HW acceleration is turned off. I was up to 11.2gb or ram out of 12gb in use last night on a 63 picture stitch but today I have 1gb spare on a 35 pic stitch

I'll have to answer the other questions later as i'm going to do another large panorama whilst I go to bed.....it'll probably still be going in the morning and i'll see if I can take the relative screenshots....pending on whether my computer allows me to do a second task.

[Bololoco]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Can you share one of the files you're adding into your panorama?

Do you mean the entire batch of RAWs?

[Bololoco]

This was packed with 7zip. They're ORF files which are Olympus RAW format. Affpho can read them without a problem.

 

It's not a particularly interesting scene but it's one I haven't stitched together yet.

And I should mention that it's all been taken by hand, without a tripod, so may have a few holes in the rinal product as well as some mismatched joints because I haven't done anything to correct the parallax

28th Nov 23.7z

[Bololoco]

Time for bed so can't answer anything until tomorrow. I've just started another large panorama, so hopefully it'll be finished by midday tomorrow.

[Bololoco]

and they're sRGB, although I sometimes use Adobe RGB

[walt.farrell]

Are you making the panorama from the RAW files or from JPG files that you Developed from them? 

1 hour ago, Bololoco said:

Do you mean the entire batch of RAWs?

I meant one of the files you're using in the panorama. I can work with what you uploaded (thanks) but I need to know whether you're making the panorama from the RAW files or whether you've Developed them first. And if you've Developed them first, it would help to have one of them, too.

[ashf]

Panorama stitching those RAWs on my PC maxed out 24GB ram.
So I guess you need 32GB or more to process it smoothly.

Or like Walt mentioned, developing them into RGB/8 makes it easier.