Hi Guys,
Need your help to chose a laptop processor. Currently I am using i3-6006U with 4GB DDR4 RAM and HDD. Bought it 6 years ago. Rawtherapee is taking 24 seconds to process one NEF file which is driving me nuts. Now I am planning to buy a new laptop. Should I go for ryzen 7 / i7 or it will be a overkill? Can anyone give me some idea of how much time it takes to open/process a NEF file in ryzen 5 / i5 machine with rawtherapee?
Thanks in advance.
Morning, @saikat903852 and welcome!
A little difficult to know what you mean with “open/process” 
But if I open a terminal, and type in the command
rawtherapee _LGH0064.NEF
The image will open up on the monitor in about 1.53 seconds.
The .NEF comes from this thread: Strong gels, low key photo - #14 by XavAL
However, I am not using a laptop, but a Ryzen 9 3900X CPU with a good GFX
and lots of RAM. But at least that would give you a figure to compare with.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Thanks for your reply. By process I meant saving the picture using process queue with few simple adjustment like exposure, shadow highlights, soft light etc.
Aha!
All right: then please use the .NEF I linked to above,
perform your wizardry, and send me the .pp3 file
that was created. Then I could peform the same up here…
_LGH0064.NEF.pp3 (13.2 KB)
You, @saikat903852, don’t mention it so I’m going to just in case you are not aware of this: RawTherapee leans heavily on CPU power and it does not utilize opencl at all.
As stated by @Claes, it is pointless to throw some numbers your way without having a reference/framework to compare it to.
I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 + 32Gb (desktop) machine and am also willing to run your NEF + pp3. Do provide a good description how you measured and arrived at the 24 seconds.
Starting RawTherapee, loading the RAW+pp3 and put the result in the queue.
If I press start to create an 8bits JPG, quality 98, sampling best quality, it takes 2 seconds to create said jpg.
That is on the latest development version (5.8-3151)
I used quality 100, and I would say slightly less than 2 seconds.
@Claes: I expected as much. Your CPU being more powerful 
I do believe that the amount of memory also comes into play here. 4Gb is not much at all when it comes to RAW editing and might be a bottle-neck of its own.
I know I have enough memory on board and I do believe this is also the case for Claes’ machine.
Hi @Jade_NL , Thanks for informing that “RawTherapee leans heavily on CPU power”.
Description of how I arrived at the 24 seconds:
I made some simple adjustments like exposure, shadow/highlights, soft light etc of 10 NEF files. Each NEF files are nearly 25MB. I put all of them in process queue. Then started the queue with all the background process stopped. This way average time taken to process each image was nearly 24 seconds. File format is set to JPEG quality = 90, sub sampling = Best quality.
I just looked up what the specs are for the i3-6006U you have at the moment: 2Ghz, 4 threads (2 cores) and 3MB cache. That, coupled with the limited 4Gb you have makes for a slow editing machine.
You mention some basic edits, things will become more CPU intensive and thus slower if you start using, for example, Wavelet Levels, Dynamic Range Compression and/or Tone Mapping.
I mentioned RawTherapee leaning on CPU power (+memory), and this is true, but also realize that other programs (Krita, darktable, GIMP etc) do make use of opencl. Don’t neglect your GPU(-card) in you next laptop/desktop just because RT only uses the CPU.
@saikat903852 Does it have to be a laptop??? :-)))
@Claes Unfortunately yes 
Thanks a lot to both of you for your advices. I have narrowed down my search to the following two configurations:
Ryzen™ 5 5625U with AMD raidon graphics and 16GB RAM: 822 USD
Ryzen™ 7 5825U with AMD raidon graphics and 16GB RAM : 940 USD
Do you guys think I should put 100 USD extra for Ryzen 7?
At that difference in price I would consider how long would you keep the computer. Do you plan to upgrade in a couple of years or keep it for as long as you can? In the latter case a more powerful machine may give you a better experience at the end of its life, even if it seems an overkill today. And distributed along the lifetime of the laptop the extra money may not be so much.
Thanks. That does make sense. I guess I will go for r7. Thanks a lot everyone!
@saikat903852 i estimate, you’re on windows? In the meantime it could help to activate the ultimate power mode, which usually not can be found in the standard settings.
As example, how to access the ultimate power mode, see here:
I would be interested to see if this makes any difference in raw processing times on the laptop of @saikat903852 as it was developed for workstations.
@Thomas_Do Good question, i just realized a nice speedup on my desktop system by applying this mode. May be @saikat903852 can give report 
I just got a new PC a month ago. I will run a few bench tests I have been running to test out the new OpenCl tweaks and then enable this…I may already have I know when I got it I had a couple of pretty extensive performance tweaking documents that I went through to try to wring out every possible bit of performance …