Digital Light & Color

Does anyone have experience of running PWP5 on Vista 64 bit?
Our XP pc is dying and we need a new machine soon.
What would be a good spec for the new PC?
Thanks

It works well with Vista 64-bit (but still runs as a 32-bit application and thus does not take advantage of the larger available address space potentially available).

Jonathan...

Somewhat related to Simon's OP... would you recommend a quad-core processer?

I have an AMD Athlon64x2 6000+ processer and 32bit Vista, that takes approx. 2 minutes for the BilateralSharpen transform to compute a 'mean image' for a 3456x2314 pixel image when the Blur Radius is set to maximum [20].

I have been experimenting with this transform as a portrait 'skin smoother' and the max blur setting seems to be one of the settings that provides the best results. [I will soon place a workflow in the TIPs section which suggests determining initial settings with a 1:1 skin image area crop that speeds up the transform settings selections, then change the Input image to the full sized one.]

Currently the only transformation that uses multiple cores is bilateral sharpen. We are looking at supporting multiple cores across more transformations for future versions.

In addition to multi-tasking in Sharpen, Picture Window also makes use of additional cores in browse, history and workflow, all of which use background processes.

Kiril

Simon: I Have been using PWP 5 on Vista 64 since 5 came out and it works fine for what I have done so far. You will need to ask the same question of other software you use and especially your hardware drivers.

Den: I also have a Quad core, although I got that for other reasons (a 3D game), not to enhance PWP functioning. I had a 3072x2048 image open in PWP and I tried bilateral sharpen. It took a minute to generate a preview at radius 20. Sometimes the bar would move smoothly for the minute, sometimes the bar would go about a quarter of the way, then get the Vista hourglass and 'not responding" in the title bar, but it would still finish in a minute.

Simon again: This is the first I have tried bilateral sharpen. I'm not sure if this behavior qualifies as "works fine". It did finish, but seeing an error state, even temporarily, doesn't seem optimal.

Kevin

Kevin...

The 'not responding' after only a partial progress dialog is normal for me too. Since I have a dual core and you a quad-core, I would expect your compute 'mean image' time to be about half which it appears to be for approx. the same pixel dimensions.

Since the transform completes, I have learned to ignore the 'not responding' status. If the 'task manager' is on the performance tab, I can see that the CPU is at 100% and hear the AMD processer fan ramp up.... so things are working inspite the program screen indications.