Dears,
It’s been a while since hardware requirements for DT were discussed. In the meantime, DT evolved with several versions, there is new hardware on the market. Would it be possible to define now a required/recommended hardware configuration on Windows for DT in terms of RAM, processsor, graphical card? I think that would help lots of people who are new to DT and those who are looking for HW renewal. That would be also helpul for me;-)
Thanks in advance.
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I’m not really sure all that much has changed. Buy the best hardware you can afford. More cores are better, at least 16GB RAM, and a video card that has good OpenCL support for your platform.
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I’d recommend to look at latest AMD hardware. I’d say that it’s currently superior to Intel, and slightly cheaper. There are plenty use cases around with ROCm working fine. I do have older AMD hardware, so I use amdgpu opensource driver plus OpenCL bulb pulled from closed amdgpu-pro. Works just fine.
Just a few points of clarification…
Beignet, the old and deprecated version of Intel OpenCL, is turned off in darktable. These statements are true for it.
However, Neo, the new and faster OpenCL implementation from Intel, is enabled for darktable and it does provide speedups. It’s definitely fast enough that you can feel a boost. (Follow instructions on installing Neo on various Linux distributions, as most don’t ship it yet.)
FWIW: I’m using an Dell XPS13 9360 with an Intel HD Graphics 620.
Additionally, every release of darktable gets faster (thanks to a lot of effort from the awesome devs). The latest development build of from git is faster than the release version, which was faster than the previous release, and so on.
I’m sure it’s not as fast as an AMD or NVidia GPU — I’m not recommending an Intel GPU over the others, if you have the choice — but it’s still better than nothing and generally not bad at all to use. And my laptop’s CPU & GPU are both a few years old now; the latest gen is most definitely faster too.
So, if you are “stuck” with only an Intel GPU right now, at least check out the Neo OpenCL support. It could extend the lifetime of your hardware a bit longer. 
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NVidia’s official stance about Linux – “We don’t support Linux”. Even Linus’ finger has not worked. Which leads to problem with drivers: FOSS drivers are well behind, you’ll have to use closed source blobs if you need OpenCL. Also NVidia has its proprietary CUDA, so OpenCL is not a priority for them. On the contrary, AMD has a team of Linux devs.
However, well, it works quite decently. But I consider AMD as a safer bet.
That’s very interesting to know, thanks @garrett !
I wasnt aware of this Intel support for their integrated gpus.
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Thank you all for you answers.
BTW, do you know if DT developpers are still more focused on Linux than on Windows? That was the case some time ago and I wonder if something has changed since then.
Yes the vast majority of developers are still Linux users.
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I’d posted this in another thread. I got some friends to install dt and export a raw file that I’d sent. All were running windows.
LG Gram with i5 1035G7 and Intel UHD - 34sec . Does not use opencl.
HP Omen with 4800H and rtx2060 - 9sec.
desktop i7 6700k + gtx1060 - 10.8secs.
Acer Swift 3 4500U 20sec. Doesn’t use opencl.
My desktop: i5 3450 +gtx1050ti - 18secs.
Hi, has anyone been to able to get opencl working on either intel or amd iGpu, on windows?
yes, but you might need to edit your darktablerc file: opencl_disable_drivers_blacklist=true
Cool. I’ll ask my friend with the LG gram to test it out.
I currently run Linux on a well equipped MacBook pro retina 2015. Works well, but onboard intel- iris graphics don’t provide opencl functionality for Davinci resolve or dark table. Thinking of swapping it for a thinkpad P50 with similar specs but with nvidia quattro. Will use for light photo and video editing when travel becomes possible.
Any thoughts on doing this?
My recent experience with AMD and OpenCL was less than successful, AMD Radeon RX580 causing instability / crashes on heavy OpenCL calculations.
Returned the card under warranty for a refund, and replaced it with an Nvidia GTX 1660.
Opensource drivers are all well and good, but if they don’t work well, then I’d rather use proprietary drivers that do.
Looks like the Thinkpad will work. I did run Davinci on the Mac under the MacOS, and it worked, but not very smoothly. With Linux, can’t get it to run.
I don’t know for the latest version of Da Vinci Resolve, but for the past 2 years I had to remove Intel Neo OpenCL otherwise it would crash Resolve straight at startup with no useful log.
@Marcsitkin I have a faint recollection that daVinci not-too-long-ago
bundled daVinci Resolve with Centos 7.6 (ought still to be available).
I had it running using Manjaro. Note: I am using an Nvidia GFX
with proprietary drivers.
http://davinci.asu.edu/index.php?title=Download_For_RedHat/CentOS
I managed to get daVinci Resolve working on Manjaro as well, but it was unreadable on a high resolution screen unless I performed some ugly scaling trick at the X11 level. At that point I switched to KDEnlive, which was sufficient for my purposes, and with some config it could use the NVIDIA GPU for final rendering of the videos.
Yes intel neo have been removed in darktable (at least in windows) for time.
But the problem with Intel drivers seems to have been solved already.
Intel has opened drivers in windows too, and now it seems to use the same codebase as in linux.
You can enable intel graphics cards with the appropiate tweak in darktablerc config file.
I have done and am using the integrated graphics in my I7 8700K processor (HD 620) to generate previews and my nvidia 1050 Ti to main processing and it works fast and well till now.
I will have to use it for more time in order to be sure, but I had no crashes or problems.
May be others would try again (many people has Intel HD graphics in their computers in the motherboard or in the cpu).
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