Thanks for this informative post. One question that would be very useful to get an answer to is: which operations/functions in ON1 are most dependent on the GPU? Above is mentioned the exporting of images; what about all the new AI functions, Noise AI, Tack Sharp, etc. – are they mostly CPU- or GPU-intensive? I think different considerations will be important to different users – some will care more about speed during manipulation, some more about speed of export, etc. Would be very useful to have some indications, especially as ON1 has developed a lot since this original post.

I am wondering however if, and if so how much the analyses with the introduction of the M1, M1 PRO and M1 MAX soc chips by Apple, has changed.

With system on chip all components share a unified memory bank that’s integrated, thus there will be far less read write memory activity in between the components, thus theoretically one would need less RAM.

Secondly, I didn’t know that ON1 in editing mode prefers to use GPU and only reverts back to CPU if the gpu cant keep up or is not able to do the editing. That raises the same question; with the new Apple chips then theoretically more GPU cores will have bigger impact than more cpu cores (I.e. the PRO CHIP comes with 8/14 or 10/14 or 10/16 cpu/gpu cores and with 16 or 32 Gb)
If I extrapolate your excellent explanation to the new chips, then I would argue that for editing with ON1 the 2 extra GPU cores might have bigger impact then the 2 extra cpu cores, plus spending $ 400 extra for the upgrade to 32 Gb is probably waste of money

Hi Joel,

I am looking for a new workstation as well. Either a iMac or a Windows based system. The Windows based system I was also looking at the Ryzen 3950X because of cores, with 32 GB memory. The graphics card I am leaning towards the NVidia RTX 2080 with 8 Gb of memory. This because of the # of cores and the 8Gb of memory as On1 PR can make use of the graphics card and certainly the memory in it. Just did not make up my mind as I need to “clear” my living room from any computer as we only have a small apartment….. So putting everything down with a Windows based system will be a sort of a hassle, and the iMac you just put it on the table and one cable and voila …. But then again a Windows based system and component specs are very attractive from a performance point of view and price point (as Apple is very expensive on “extras” which should be ” normal” for us as photographers. So, still brewing ……… 🙂

Also, I was planning on an Nvidia RTX 2020 Super however after your explanation of GPU processing I think the money would be better spent increasing to the RTX 2020 ti and dropping system memory from 64 to 32 gig. I can always easily increase memory in the future if needed.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks

I do find that the CPU of my current computer Dell XPS 9100 -Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz Cores 4, Video Card – ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series with 1 GB video memory, Work very hard when running ON1 2020, it revs up and down continuously.
Would i be right to assume more memory on the Video card would help?

Thanks