My desktop computer is broken. I need to buy a new one. What do people recommend for running darktable (UK)?
PS. Is an RTX2060 6GB a reasonable GPU (I am looking at Armari, my past supplier, and this is what the default configuration comes with)
Thank you.
The system I am looking at has an EVGA GeForce RTX2060 KO Ultra 6GB PCIe3.0 x16 Graphics card and AMD Ryzen 5 5600XT 3.7-4.6GHz 6 Core UNLOCKED Processor, so that souns similar.
I noticed a massive difference when upgrading my GPU and am perfectly happy with my 6GB 1060, so any recent Nvidia card should be fine. I subsequently upgraded my CPU, motherboard and RAM from a fourth generation i5 to an 11th generation i5 and my export times hardly changed at all. So again, anything recent should be fine. On Linux, for me, 16GB RAM seems plenty.
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I recently bought a new desktop computer and chose an AMD 5600X for the CPU and an AMD 6700XT for the GPU. It works really well for darktable, gaming, and everything else too. I use the Silverblue version of Fedora Linux 36 exclusively (no dual-booting) for everything.
I chose this specific processor and GPU combo to have something quite powerful, but also something that doesnât take as much electricity (compared to others in the current lineup) and doesnât output too much heat (meaning less reliance on cooling and better for summer months).
The graphics work âout of the boxâ in Fedora 36 for everything except OpenCL acceleration. To install that, I currently need to add a copr (from the official maintainer of rocm in Fedora) @ mystro256/rocm-opencl Copr (as Fedora by itself has rocm, but not rocm-opencl yet). darktable picks it up and everythingâs OpenCL accelerated. It seems rocm-opencl is in Fedora 36 testing right now, and should make it to F36 soon. 
AMDâs rocm project is open source, so it (and the openCL support it provides) should be available in some way for all distros. (It might require compiling if they donât ship packages yet, however.)
I specifically went with an AMD GPU versus an NVidia one, as AMDâs support is open source and upstreamed in the Linux kernel, meaning itâll always work and be supported by default by all Linux distros. NVidia would require a proprietary driver and extra steps to install for even basic support, which would cause headaches during OS installation and upgrades.
Itâs been a few months and Iâve been very happy with it. Everything in darktable is basically instant now, even the âdiffuse or sharpenâ module. (Iâm used to my several-years-old laptop with an Intel 620 GPU where I had to wait for everything, even with openCL on.)
If youâre using Windows, Iâm sure the CPU and GPU also work well there too.
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Just some basics: choose at least 6GB of video ram for images up to 40Mpix to avoid slowdown because of tiling.
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I have that gpu and everything is fast, never have to wait for âworkingâ, including multiple instances of diffuse and sharpen. The only slow module is guided laplacians in highlight restruction, which I never really use. If you were going to batch export hundreds of images at a time you might notice a difference with a faster card, but otherwise I doubt youd see much difference.
May depend on your monitor too. Mine is 2k, which is easier on the gpu than 4k.
I am on RTX2070 8GB - on a laptop.
Especially with DT 4 - it is very good experience.
My files are 20 MP (Canon 70D) but even with bigger files - I downloaded some samples from Canon 5D, Sony ILCE-7M4, ILCE-7RM4, ILCE-7C
Nikon NIKON Z 7_2
They all behave well.
The âworkingâ appears for 2s or so.
Canât predict if the extra $$ were useful or not. Remains to be seen for how long it will last.
Currently 2 year old machine.
They are now offering me an 8GB RTX3050. Is this better or worse than a 6GB RTX2060 for photography?
I have seen benchmark comparisons - the 3050 is about 75% perfromance, but maybe the extra memory is more important for use with darktable? Especially when my Nikon Z9 arrives, with itâs large raw files?
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The number of cores in the GPU card are the biggest factors than memory. Yes, have enough memory to avoid tiling, but cores is the biggest factor. The cores are also called processing units or similar names.
Better cards also need more power supply, so check that too. Prices of GPU are starting to drop.
My system spec is a Ryzen 7, 3700X, Nvidia GTX 1660 GPU, and 32GB of ram.
One thing about choosing an AMD GPU, is although the drivers are opensource, the OpenCL / ROCM part of the drivers I found a nightmare to get working (AMD RX580 GPU).
Less hassle on Nvidia, just install the drivers, and there you go.
I use a Ryzen 5 5600X and an NVidia 1060/6GB, and have set up darktable to always use the card, if possible, because itâs so much faster than the CPU.
In darktablerc:
opencl_device_priority=+0/+0/+0/+0/+0
opencl_mandatory_timeout=20000
opencl_scheduling_profile=default
(The priority line forces the use of the GPU; the profile is needed to make sure darktable actually uses the specified priorities; the long timeout makes darktable wait for the GPU in case it is busy.)
For details on the timeout, see:
Note that youâll have to run from the command-line with -d opencl to see if a timeout happens.
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Thatâs what Iâm using, and so far it is completely up to the task.
It is quite a bit better.
One thing about choosing an AMD GPU, is although the drivers are opensource, the OpenCL / ROCM part of the drivers I found a nightmare to get working (AMD RX580 GPU).
Yes, that used to be the case.
However, as of the past week in Fedora 36, you can install it by doing:
sudo dnf install rocm-opencl
âŚAnd thatâs it. Done!
(For Silverblue, youâd do rpm-ostree install rocm-opencl and reboot. Or try it with --apply-live first to skip rebooting.)
Of course, other distributions will vary.
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I think Nvidia is pretty well supported in Ubuntu (maybe und Debian, too). I just install the package available in the disto.
I certainly had major issues with Linux Mint and Ubuntu based distros getting OpenCL working on an AMD RX580 gpu.
Whereas with nvidia on Linux mints, itâs just a case of installing the nvidia drivers using the âDriver Managerâ in the settings dialogue.
AMD ROCM still has rather limited OpenCL support compared to nVidia CUDA. IIRC the darktable recommended specs even mention better/less buggy support from nVidia. I think Blender and/or Davinci Resolve just added limited AMD ROCM support very recently on Linux too and still say nVidia is their recommended vendor. That doesnât even get into encoder support if youâre doing video. NVENC obliterates FAAPI in my experience. It may be different on Windows.
Iâve got a desktop with an RX 6900 XT and a laptop with an nVidia RTX 3060 both on Fedora Workstation myself. The nVidia drivers arenât that onerous to install and while I buy AMD cards to support their open source efforts nVidia is still the âjust worksâ choice for Linux media production for the moment. I actually use my laptop more for transcoding because NVENC is just that much faster despite the RX 6900 XT being a monster card. I think AMDâs approach is better but itâs not mature yet.
@Brian_Innes what motherboard did you use with this system? Iâm shopping for an upgrade after 10+ yrs :).