Adobe Camera Raw performance

[hakuryuu]

I recently started doing image color balance processing at work. We have an aerial camera system made up of 5 Canon 1DSMarkIIs and everything is of course shot in RAW. I have been doing it on some very quickly aging hardware and convinced my boss to spring for a new workstation pretty soon. I will either be getting a Mac Pro or a Dell workstation(eww I know).

As it is I deal with anywhere from 400-1000 (multiply that by 5 as I only deal with one camera's files at a time) raw files at a time through Bridge and then loaded into Camera Raw. There is a huge difference just between the single core 3.0ghz desktop at work and the dual core 2.0 ghz laptop I have sitting next to me right now (I don't use my MBP because I don't have a Mac copy of CS3 yet). So I assume a 4 or 8 core 2.8ghz system would be amazing.

My big question is whether I would see a bigger performance improvement with the 8 core or 4 core system? And also whether it would be better to get the cheaper 4 core and get extra RAM or the other way around? My boss is going to want to keep this as cheap as possible so I am trying to squeeze as much out of the price as possible. And maybe get an 8800gt in it too.. haha.

 

[snagitseven]

I recently started doing image color balance processing at work. We have an aerial camera system made up of 5 Canon 1DSMarkIIs and everything is of course shot in RAW. I have been doing it on some very quickly aging hardware and convinced my boss to spring for a new workstation pretty soon. I will either be getting a Mac Pro or a Dell workstation(eww I know).

As it is I deal with anywhere from 400-1000 (multiply that by 5 as I only deal with one camera's files at a time) raw files at a time through Bridge and then loaded into Camera Raw. There is a huge difference just between the single core 3.0ghz desktop at work and the dual core 2.0 ghz laptop I have sitting next to me right now (I don't use my MBP because I don't have a Mac copy of CS3 yet). So I assume a 4 or 8 core 2.8ghz system would be amazing.

My big question is whether I would see a bigger performance improvement with the 8 core or 4 core system? And also whether it would be better to get the cheaper 4 core and get extra RAM or the other way around? My boss is going to want to keep this as cheap as possible so I am trying to squeeze as much out of the price as possible. And maybe get an 8800gt in it too.. haha.

If you use CS3, go dual quads. Big difference in performance.

 

[hakuryuu]

yeah i'll be using CS3. So dual quads will be more of an improvement than having 4-6gb of ram? It's currently one or the other at the moment.

 

[zdobson]

yeah i'll be using CS3. So dual quads will be more of an improvement than having 4-6gb of ram? It's currently one or the other at the moment.

In the future it will be much easier to upgrade your RAM than it will be to add a second processor (if even possible). Processing RAW images uses more CPU than RAM. Currently Photoshop doesn't utilize all four cores of a processor, but CS4 certainly will and that can't be more than a year away. Also, Photoshop doesn't utilize a GPU, so the 8800 is a waste for this type of work. It might use GPU in CS4, so wait until then to get one because you'll probably be able to get the 8800 for cheaper at that point, or maybe there will be more cards available then.

Getting the second processor is a good value at $500. Purchasing the processor by itself costs over $720. Plus to install it, you would have to buy a heat sink, which apple doesn't sell. You could (maybe) find a similar one, but there's no guarantee it would work and you'd void your warranty for sure.

Don't you think you can talk your boss into spending another $136 for an additional 2GB of 3rd party (DMS) RAM?