PhotoComix wrote:
No, no with 2GB would be totally hopeless and even 8 are not sufficient ( i know because i have 8 and i even if i may do some 16 bit editing, do it is a pain for me and a sort of stress test for my PC)
Obviously 20GB are fine for now, a bit more than fine since as you said even only 16GB would be sufficient... but i was talking of a close future :
20GB are good for..let say edit photos from last Canon Rebel, but may become too few for the next Canon Rebel (or how would be called its future replacement) that obviously will offer much higher resolution
The amount of RAM and # of CPU processors are relevant only to a certain point.
First problem - it depends on what you do with the raw file. Most of the 3rd party plugins are still not ported to access GEGL buffers and work with GIMP tiles, which have been around since GIMP 1.2. Tiling is very slow by its nature.
2.10 will be all about GEGL but, here we run into the second problem:
16-bit or 24-bit per channel color depth processing will be slowed down not by your computer's hardware but by processing with GEGL>OpenCL based rendering. Hardware acceleration with OpenCL is not exactly the fastest compared to some of its alternatives, computation time on NVIDIA graphic cards are too high, not much better on AMDs.
And finally, GIMP multi-threading capabilities are limited. For a number of key procedures GIMP uses just 1 thread. I've noticed that, although GIMP detects all 8 processors of my i7, it hardly utilizes more than 2 and that's where 8GB RAM is usually enough. I have 16GB but it does not perceptibly speed up image processing in GIMP, although it allows PC multitasking. Running GIMP, Blender, Skype and VCL player at the same time - no problem.