Video card for speeding up Capture One 8

I'm looking to add a video card to my computer (currently using onboard graphics; Radeon 4290) to speed up certain operations in Capture One 8. CPU is a Phenom II x6 1055T, 16GB RAM. I don't want to spend too much, and don't want a power-hungry noisy monster of a card.

I'm considering the Geforce GTX 750 which seems to be good value. I could also go for a lower-end Geforce GT 730 (passively cooled). I don't know which specs are important for photo work (GPU clock speed cuda cores, # of stream processors, amount of video ram, memory bandwith  etc). So maybe a lower-end card would suffice because higher end cards are only better in areas that are important for gaming?

As a side note: I'm not really a heavy user. My camera is an Olympus E-M1 with relatively modest 14MB RAW files.

You have a relatively slow CPU (although its decent from a price/performance standpoint, just not from a straight performance standpoint) but using a discrete card should help. The card you are considering, the 750, is a good performer and should help. Probably the next best things you can do, other than get a faster processor, is to go to 32GB of RAM and use an SSD rather than an HD for your system drive.

Thanks E.J. Would it make a difference to get one with 2GB video RAM in stead of 1GB?

An ssd is already in. For me this -indeed not too new- machine does everything I need. I don't do too much cpu intensive work with it, so I mostly buy components in the good value range, like the 1055T a few years back.The CPU is largely idle most of the time, I've never seen more RAM in use than somewhere in the 7GB range. Only calculating previews etc in Capture One can take a few seconds, so I'd like to speed that up the way the ssd has sped up the machine. As long as I haven't seen an i7 at work, I don't know what I'm missing

I'm not sure if the video card will address your specific problem with C1-8, but if you are going to up-grade your video card, I would go for one that has a 256-bit memory bus, rather than the one that you have selected which has a 128-bit bus.

2GB might help, I do recommend 2GB as the minimum memory for a graphics card these days, but the fundamental limiter on your system is the CPU.

For a 256 bit memory bus I would have to get a GTX 970, which is too expensive for me. But like E.J. says both GPU and CPU matter, so with my older CPU I would probably not benefit from a really fast card. So I guess the GTX 750 2GB it is!

You should find out if the program is CPU intensive or GPU intensive. Then you'll know what to improve to help running the program. I could be wrong, you can buy the most advanced video card today but I doubt a lot of techs put into those cards are used by photo-processing programs.

Capture One 8 does delegate some tasks to the GPU (uses OpenCL). Processing files, fitting images to screen, and I think also recalculating of previews so that sliders show immediate response with a fast GPU as opposed to having to wait a few seconds.

I have ordered the card and will report some hand clocked timings when I have it up and running.

DChan wrote:You should find out if the program is CPU intensive or GPU intensive. Then you'll know what to improve to help running the program. I could be wrong, you can buy the most advanced video card today but I doubt a lot of techs put into those cards are used by photo-processing programs.

C1 and the Adobe photo programs do offload things to the GPU if the GPU is capable of handling them.

E.J. Peiker wrote:

DChan wrote:You should find out if the program is CPU intensive or GPU intensive. Then you'll know what to improve to help running the program. I could be wrong, you can buy the most advanced video card today but I doubt a lot of techs put into those cards are used by photo-processing programs.

C1 and the Adobe photo programs do offload things to the GPU if the GPU is capable of handling them.

Understood. In fact, if you look at video card reviews, you'd see Photoshop is one of the programs used in performance tests. And, because of the GPU that I'm using, I was asked to change a setting in DxO Optics Pro in order to make it work properly.


If that means anything, I myself use a GTX 770, which, sad to say, is kind of out-dated by today's standard.

Well, the card is installed (MSI GTX750 2GB) and it certainly makes a difference. Processing 10 RAW files took 1 minute 18 seconds yesterday, using al 6 CPU cores up to 100%. With the new videocard installed it only takes 15 seconds!

Changing sliders (especially noise reduction) also gives more instant feedback now. The only thing that has not changed is the time needed to zoom to 100%. This still takes 3.5-4 seconds. A pity, as I use that quite often. Maybe this task is not delgated to the GPU by C1.

Wow, I guess that answers how much C1 uses a GPU. Very good info to have!!!

Neatimage (7.6 Win standalone 64-bit) can also make use of the GPU. It has a built-in benchmark that reports 11 MPix/sec CPU only (6 cores), 13.6 MPix/sec GPU only and 19.8 MPix/sec CPU+GPU.