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Focal Blade multiple thread support

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 1:58 am
by KeithL
With Hyper-Threading and now Dual Cores I was wondering if Focal Blade plans on leveraging these technologies? It seems that Focal Blade is single threaded as I watch one CPU get nailed when Focal Blade is processing while the other sits idle. Seems PS CS and other plugins (soon Neat Image) do or will leverage the multiple CPUs, will Focal Blade at some point?

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 2:13 pm
by HaraldHeim
It is planed to make FocalBlade render much faster anyway. I will look into this new technology and see if FocalBlade can support it in a future version.

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:57 am
by Guest
FocalBlade is way too slow now, and my AMD X2 doesn't help either, FB being single threaded. SO please.....

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 5:33 pm
by HaraldHeim
FocalBlade will become much faster and support for dual cores and multiple processors is also planned.

I don't think that supporting hyperthreading will produce any speed gain. I suspect that it would rather decrease the processing speed of FocalBlade.

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 12:48 am
by Guest
Anonymous wrote:FocalBlade is way too slow now, and my AMD X2 doesn't help either, FB being single threaded. SO please.....
Recently upgraded from Athlon 1900+ (1,6 GHz) to Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ (2 x 2,64 GHz). FocalBlade now processes considerable faster than on my old machine.

Andreas

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 1:02 am
by HaraldHeim
I guess it also depends on what images you process. If you process 16 Megapixel photos, FocalBlade will run much slower. If you process 4 or 6 Megapixel photos, FocalBlade will need much less time.

Still, FocalBlade does more complex stuff than most other sharpening filters, so it also needs longer to render. As a result you also get a higher quality result.

I am going to get a quadcore...

Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:24 pm
by toninikkanen
I have tested FocalBlade and like the results very much. However it's way too slow for processing scanned medium format images (6x7 film, around 8800x6000 pixels in 16-bit color depth - huge files.)

I am going to buy a quad-core processor this year; right now the cost is over $800 but I read on the web that quad-core processor prices from Intel will drop below $300 before the end of the year. I think more and more people are going to increase their processing power by going multi-core due to the dropping prices.

Unfortunately FocalBlade still doesn't support multiprocessing - if it did, the speed difference would be HUGE. What is the current situation with the multiprocessing support and other speed improvements?

Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 2:00 pm
by HaraldHeim
The next major upgrade of FocalBlade will render much faster on single core processors and even faster on hyperthreading and multi-core processors.

Still, FocalBlade will never be as fast as Photoshop's Unsharp Mask filter, because it does much more internal processing which also leads to better sharpening results.

Bought a quad-core processor today...

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 10:30 pm
by toninikkanen
I just upgraded my dual-core CPU to quad (Intel Core 2 Q6600, 2.4GHz quad-core) for just 269EUR - the same price I paid for my dual core 2.13GHz Intel processor just a year ago. This autumn is definitely a good time for increasing processing power :)

I hope the parallelized Focalblade is coming along... I will gladly help with any beta testing you might need done. I am a software developer myself and know the difference between useful and useless bug reports.