Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 4.5.X is slow (performance)

[raviballa]

I would love to continue to use DPP for its color output. But, where I am struggling with is its slowness to process RAW files. Loading of the RAW files is slow and I cannot tell when my minor corrections are applied to the image (there is no indication of DPP processing my adjustments). The 'Quick Check' of images is good though, without any lag.

Any suggestions?

[SenJerzy]

Thank you for your attention. Unfortunately did not help.

Processing (opening for edit) RAW file of 35 MB (taken by EOS 5DMarkIV) takes about 10sek.

Maybe I do not have very vast PC but still:

  GTX1060 6 GB card,

 Intel(R) Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz 4.01 GHz

 with16 GB RAM and

 fast SSD for system and apps.

[The_real_BFM]

Hi senjerzy. That's a shame. You need to ensure your PC is running as well as possible. I never know how technical to make these comments, but you should remove all temporary files, clean out your cache, make sure you have the latest version of Windows (I'd recommend 10) which has no problems (run sfc /scannow if necessary to check) and the nvidia driver for your video card, ensure you have plenty of spare SSD space (50Gb at least) and use the latest DPP4. I also run DPP4 on a laptop which also has 16Gb of RAM (my main PC has 32 Gb), and even that's quicker than yours, suggestng something isn't optimised. Are you using SATA3?

[wq9nsc]

The slowest files to open for me are 1DX III RAW files which take about 1 second, 5DS and 5DS R files are slightly faster so for all practical purposes there is no delay.  The slowest operations are digital lens optimizer which often takes around 5 seconds and worst of all is the stamp/clone/dust tool which will take about 10-15 seconds before it allows editing with a 1DX III files, about 1/3 of that time with 5DS or 1DX II files.

DPP doesn't make very good use of the GPU.  I have an Nvidia GTX 2060 in my HP Z820 workstation and a pair of Nvidia workstation graphics cards in my HP Z840 workstation.  I have never seen GPU utilization go over 10% regardless of DPP operation and when I upgraded the Z820 to the GTX 2060 from an older Nvidia card, there was no discernible improvement.  The highest CPU loading I have seen is in the upper 30% range when working with 1DX III files and that peak loading only occurs for a very brief time, I don't think DPP does very well at utilizing the resources available with many PCs.

Both workstations have dual Intel Xeon processors, plenty of RAM (128 GB per CPU in the Z820 and 256 GB per CPU in the Z840), and fast SSDs.  I put a second HP SSD on the PCI bus in the Z840 for DPP and that made a slight improvement over using the SSD array via its RAID for DPP but the improvement was marginal.

One thing that has been true of almost every release of DPP is a "memory leak" issue.  Although I have never seen RAM usage go over 10% when running DPP plus a number of other apps, after DPP has been running for an hour or more the memory in use will climb to several gigabytes and it becomes sluggish.  When I am processing a lot of photos after a sports event (I shoot with 2 or 3 camera bodies depending upon the event), I will exit and restart DPP every hour or so as needed to keep it fast.

I think DPP is like Windows in that it has been patched and revised so many times that it is a clumsy mess.  It would be nice to see a fresh update that solves the memory leak and better utilizes the GPU.

Rodger

[lverette]

I have DPP 4.15 and had slowness as well. Called Canon and though the tech was great, his speed was still way better than mine. It was taking me 2 minutes to save 1 file! He did explain to copy my raw files to the hard drive so the program didn't have to read from my camera card or external drive, but that made no difference in performance for me. I am on a MAC. I tried your steps and a couple more all at once and something worked but not sure what. Here is what I did in case it helps someone else: Preferences / general settings: Deleted temp files and cache plus set maximum available on disk to 32. Went into the Tools palette, select the gear tab and at the bottom set viewing and saving raw images to [prioritize speed]. Lastly, I went under my macbook's system preferences, energy star, and unchecked graphic switching. Then I rebooted. I dont know which setting worked but something did. Now it takes about 15 seconds to save my tiff files or even less if saving jpg. It still a little slow when rendering the images for display but I'm ok with that. It's the export/save that I wanted to see performance improved. And it's fine now. I hope this helps someone.

[jrhoffman75]

" Went into the Tools palette, select the gear tab and at the bottom set viewing and saving raw images to [prioritize speed]."

Since you now have it working as you wish I suggest running a test by toggling this one item between this setting and the recommended setting. The DPP manual states: 

It may not matter if you don't have one of the listed cameras, but if you do you can decide if the note about noise applies as well as if the setting is what was causing the slow speed.

[lverette]

JrHoffman75....Thanks for the input! I do have the Canon EOS R5 and that option only displays if you have one of those camera models listed. This performance issue has been bugging me since I got my 5DM4 a few years back, but I tweaked adobe camera raw to my needs and used it instead. Fast forward to my Canon R5 upgrade a few months ago and adobe still lacks profiles for the EOS R5, so I needed to come back to DPP. The program does a NICE job of processing images, but was crawling! I actually did some deeper digging after my last post reading up on my graphics cards and some other settings. I changed back to prioritize for image quality. But I ultimately suspect what fixed mine is the 'graphic switching setting on my mac'. I have two graphics cards, NVIDIA for my thunderbolt monitor and a Built in Intel on my macbook pro. When I switched the setting back to allow switching, saving was slow again. I uncheck the 'allow switching ' option, saving ran fast again. According to apple's explanation about this setting under the energy star setting in system preferences, my mac is utilizing the robust capabilities of nvidia card when I turn off switching. and since I keep my mac plugged 90% of the time, it doesn't matter that I leave it unchecked. So the graphics card is a #1 factor for 'me'. Second, I tested save with files from my SD card vs files on my Desktop, It was exactly 10 seconds faster saving from files already on the desktop. So that is factor #2. I did alter a setting in preferences to display RAW files at 25%. It seems to render them just a bit faster, but not by much (again this does not bother me as much as the save. I'm not sure if allowing temporary files storage or not is a factor. Dont have more time right now to play with this. Also the DPP manual says to use Convert and Save as a higher quality method for saving. Though this setting may not impact the speed of saving, it's worth mentioning this is canon's recommendation as well.

[johnrmoyer]

On an iMac, disabling use of GPU by Chrome browser seems to speed up DPP.

[SenJerzy]

Fully agree with. DPP does not use graphic processor (in my case 1060). Even comparing with Microsoft Pictures. The final conclusion is that the software is not developed as it should be.
Regards
Jerzy

[BurnUnit]

If DPP4 seems sluggish, then you might consider a trial download of DxO OpticsPro/PhotoLab. I used OpticsPro a few years ago and it seemed to run consistently smoother and faster than the Canon software, even using an AMD processor and a vrery basic, older graphics card. I found it capable of doing anything I ever wanted to do with DPP4.

Of course I was only working with 18MP RAW files from my Canon 60D.