How many Pentiums in a D60?

[dEARlEADER]

I just started shooting raw......

I took a batch of pic's of my son indoors lowlight @ ISO800

I'm using CaptureNX to do a little noise reduction, distortion control, and white balance adjustment.

I am running a batch program on 18 of these photo's... I've been waiting 15 minutes and there is STILL 3 photo's left for processing....

I have QUAD 2gig Pentiums and 3 gig RAM.... wtf????
I can see the performance meter and all four processors are running near 100%...

Either technology is moving fast and my 3 month old computer is already outdated or Capture NX is the biggest resource hog I've ever seen....

It kinda makes me wonder how many pentiums are crammed in the D60 as it's able to shoot 3 FPS...

 

[manaheim]

I have a dual-core 2.26 and 2 gigs of RAM and processing my D300 raw images is pretty snappy with Photoshop. Dunno about CaptureNX... I couldn't figure out how to do anything useful in that software so I gave it up quickly.

 

[djrichie28]

I tired CaptureNX once. Too slow. Same problem here. Must be a processor hog. Also found that even the ViewNX was really slow when making adjustments to RAW files too.

 

[Joxby]

CaptureNX is a bit of a sod, I was thinking I was due an new PC, but after this post maybe its the software that needs chucking at the same time.
So my PC is an old crate, Celeron D 2.6 and 1g of ram, NX ran pretty ok with 5mb D70 raw's, but recently I've been using my D200 more, the raw's are 15mb and NX is taking an ungodly amount of time to open them.
500mb of ram to open 1 raw is only a lot of memory if you only have 1gb to start with.
What does a quad pentium with 3g of ram run like opening images singularly ?

 

[dEARlEADER]

CaptureNX is a bit of a sod, I was thinking I was due an new PC, but after this post maybe its the software that needs chucking at the same time.
So my PC is an old crate, Celeron D 2.6 and 1g of ram, NX ran pretty ok with 5mb D70 raw's, but recently I've been using my D200 more, the raw's are 15mb and NX is taking an ungodly amount of time to open them.
500mb of ram to open 1 raw is only a lot of memory if you only have 1gb to start with.
What does a quad pentium with 3g of ram run like opening images singularly ?

Even single image is slow.... not with respect to loading a picture.... but if I make an adjustment using unsharp mask it can take about 15 seconds to refresh the screen.... it's too bad.. I kind of like the simplicity of the program...

The viewNX is crap too.... every time I load it I get three nag's prompting for windows live login....

Nikon sure makes it hard for a person to stick with their software...

 

[Valethar]

The problem you're most likely running into is that PhotoShop has been optimized to make use of multiple cores, and the other probably has not. It may show all cores as being maxed, but that is not an indication of how well the code was written to efficiently use them.

 

[Joves]

Are you using the same drive that the program is on as your scratch disk. Using anoter drive for the scratch disk will help in alot of cases. But NX is still a resource hog.

 

[Valethar]

Joves makes a good point. If you have more than one drive, make sure you don't store the images on the same drive as you're using for a scratch disk.

That's going to have a potentially huge impact on read/write times, because the drive is literally time sharing between the scratch file and the image files. In addition, you're going to see more fragmentation on a single drive in this situation, which slows down drive access even more.

One thing I would do, regardless of how many drives you're using for this, is to be sure you defrag them fairly regularly if you do a lot of image editing on your PC. This will help speed things up some for you, though it may not be enough to offset the inherent resource issues with NX.

 

[Garbz]

Pentiums, none, and that's the issue. A microprocessor is the worst solution for anything generic. This includes mobile phones, voting machines etc. I don't remember my Nokia 5120 every being slow so why is my StrongARM powered phone?

Application specific Integrated circuits (ASIC) is the key. If as much history and research went into the ASIC in your camera as the pentium it would likely be able to do 10000+fps.

Also as for generic microprocessors there's also the case of poorly written programs. Capture NX is the biggest bloat of a RAW editor I've seen. My laptop can't open a single RAW in Capture NX, but runs PhotoshopCS3 and Lightroom just fine. Not quickly, but arm knawoffingly slow.

Yes I garbz just made a new word. knawoffingly

 

[Alex_B]

I never used the software you mentioned, but my RAW conversion on a not-so-up-to-date computer is MUCH faster with ANY software I tried so far.

So I assume it is not your setup, but the software.