Hardware for darktable

#1

Hi there,
I am looking for a new mobile computer to use with darktable on Arch Linux. After searching I see the Dell XPS15 7590 with 4k OLED, 16GB RAM and i7 9850H CPU. The graphics card is a onboard Intel UHD 630 and Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650.

The questions are:

  1. I know that Intel UHD 620 is blacklisted due to problems in darktable. Will UHD 630 work with opencl in darktable or is it blacklisted too?
  2. Will the GTX 1650 be fast enough for use in darktable?

Currently I do have an older Gigabyte P34Wv3 with GTX970m which meanwhile becomes slower and slower…

I am asking here, because of the laptop is mainly used for darktable and I don’t wan’t to waste money when buying a RTX 2060 instead of.

Regards,
majobu

#2

I had similar requirements when last year I completed my switch from Mac OS. In the end I bought a Dell XPS15 9560, I guess an older model with respect to yours.

You should read this thread first (if you haven’t done it already):

https://discuss.pixls.us/t/choosing-a-laptop-with-programming-and-photography-in-mind-reloaded/

In the end I opted for the conventional full-HD screen instead of the 4k. I then bought an external monitor. This makes DT snappier.

The intel graphics is useless for DT so consider that you will always be on the external nvidia card. Perhaps I may switch to Intel when I’m doing other things (internet stuff, and work-related hacking in Python) and am on the move. It’s a bit inconvenient mainly for the noise and increased power usage (using the nvidia card I mean). Things may have improved with later models, I don’t know.

I also had lots of doubts on the real speed of DT and have tried to understand whether it was a problem with the specific version of DT I was using, or my Dell, or something else… you may find interesting to read these other threads I’ve started in this forum, e.g.:

https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-speed-in-general-and-when-using-two-monitors/

https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-performance-in-lighttable-mode-tagging-etc/

#3

Why is that? Can you share more information, please?
I have a laptop with that graphic and do not see any special treatment in the debug log.

#4

Do you use OpenCL? Take a look to the output of darktable-cltest

#5

opencl is turned off for all intel onboard graphics. This is not only for UHD 620. The UHD 630 will not help you.

Please read here: https://www.darktable.org/2012/03/darktable-and-opencl/

“There also exist a few on-CPU implementations of OpenCL. These come as drivers provided by INTEL or AMD. We observed that they do not give us any speed gain versus our hand-optimized CPU code. Therefore we simply discard these devices.”

#6

I use the same hardware as you are looking for, I mainly use it to run darktable like you. I am using the Nvidia cart and OpenCL on Ubuntu 19.04. I also have the 4k screen, but in retrospect the Full-HD would have been enough. As a second monitor I am using BenQ SW2700PT - WQHD.

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#7

@mabod Thank you. That is the answer to one of my questions. As I understand, the driver ‘beignet’ is blacklisted and not some graphic chips.

#8

@Namita_nl Thanks you :slight_smile: Today I odered a Acer ConceptD 7.

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