NX/NX2:Win - Performance - Poll

[Mike Buckley]

Tom noticed awhile back that almost everyone having disabling issues, such as serious speed or crashing issues, using Capture NX or NX2 are also using XP. Please vote in the poll so we have additional anecdotal evidence verifying whether that is true as we suspect.

 

[Palouse]

I use XP on one machine and Vista on another and am doing fine, thanks to Mike and Tom!

I haven't spent much time if any, on my XP machine using NX2,other than to see if it runs. That is in art because my son has moved home and has taken over that machine rolleyes and it has only 1.25 gigs of ram . NX 1.x ran fine, albeit slower than NX2.

 

[jim hughes]

same on both

I was using XP, just recently switched to Vista. NX2 is dismally slow on both. I don't see a difference.

 

[Mike Buckley]

NX2 is dismally slow on both.

Jim, you might not be aware of Tom's tutorial that is currently a sticky post at the top of the Capture NX forum. A lot of folks including me have used it to increase the speed. If you haven't checked it out, you might want to take a look at it.

 

[jim hughes]

Mike, I 'm a software developer using VS2005 and as far as I can tell those updates were already on my machine. If NX2 would actually be much slower without them, that's a scary thought.

Because some users don't seem to be getting the boost when they installed these updates, I suspect some additional 'X' factor is involved. HOW I WISH that Nikon or Nik would get involved and figure out what's happening here - it would obviously be to their benefit.

 

[BillM]

Jim,

My desktop and laptop both had vS2008 installed. There was a boost in performance on both when I installed the VC++ 2005 Runtime Redist SP1.

Warm Regards,

 

[aldirtfarmer]

I have 3.0Mhz dual core with 4 gig ram running XP pro (only sees 3 gig of the instaled ram) with current XP updates installed. NX2 trial is running at decent speeds. I installed the C++ executable and SP1 per Toms instructions and I can not say I saw a hugh increase in speed. I'm not sure what was installed prior. I am running version 3 of the .net framework.

I also have a vista based laptop (1.75Mhz dual core 2 gig Ram) which still has NX installed on it. I'm waiting to install NX2 until I have a road trip. It is not clear to me if I need to install the same 2005 executables but I just checked and seem to have two C++ 2005 versions installed so I assume the second one is the SP1 and I'm good to go. Interesting I also seem to have version 1.1 .NEt framework which does not seem right.

That said the vista machine runs NX a lot slower than by desktop but then the processor is nearly 50% slower so I would expect that.

 

[jim hughes]

tomTom, mainly I am sad that I am not going to get a big speed boost :frown:

 

[Minuteman3]

I'm trying NX2 on a 4GB Vista Ultimate machine and it runs pretty poorly. (No such problems with the "original" NX.)

I tried a pretty simple batch process of 20 D300 NEF's (changing only the white balance) and it absolutely died after the 4th or 5th image. Took a very hard reset (power button) to unlock the computer. NX2 is the ONLY app I've seen in 18+ months that brought this machine to it's knees. On single images it seems to be OK, but slower than NX. All of my .Net installs and OS updates are up-to-date.

Cheers!!

Ken

 

[daveg]

Running NX2 on both desktop and laptop - no crashes and no speed issues.

Running the tip above seemed to improve the speed even more.

DaveG

 

[TomaS]

still using the NX2 demo but my experience so far:
NX2 is a bit faster
NX2 user interface is MUCH better (once you get the hang of it)
NX2 crashes often (my machine) while NX never did. Today i was trying to work on a dozen images to get them ready for printing. Only one file open at any time. I experienced stalls viewing thumbnails in the browser, 'Out of memory' errors while trying to save files and thus rendering all my adjustment work useless, program crashes (twice). All of the above now require me to shut down the program after working on a couple images and re-start it to avoid the problems. Lots of fun.

Win XP with all service packs, all recommended updates, 3GB of RAM, multiple hard drives with cache set as recommended.

Talk about a love/hate relationship.....:Love:/

 

[jim hughes]

NX = love + hate

TomaS, did you have other applications running at the same time? Is your system burdened with any other 'background' processes/services that you might have installed? Most of us experience strangely slow operations by NX2 at times, but few actual crashes or lockups. "Out of memory" is a pretty drastic situation for Windows, and really you should never encounter it.

"Love-hate relationship" describes it exactly. I can get beautiful results with NX. The selection tools, noise reduction, sharpening, are excellent. The GUI is just fine with me, a bit different, I actually like that aspect. NX2 didn't really add much, but what it added was good. But, the slowness... the slowness...

My machine is low-end by photo processing standards - an older single-core Athlon and 1 GB. But it seems that even if I drop big bucks on a whole new motherboard with 4GB, there's no guarantee things will take off. There seems to be some other 'X' factor that greatly affects the performance, which no one has a handle on. Yes tomTom has apparently made a big discovery - that for many if not most people, upgrading the C++ runtime makes a big difference. But in some cases, NX just fails to launch and I wish we could figure out why.

 

[TomaS]

I have 3GB of REAL memory installed, not 4.

Minimal background apps running - i remove them to maximize RAM.
Two other application always open, Outlook and Firefox. No other program ever gave me problems like NX2 in the 2 years i have had this PC. Office apps, Paint Shop Pro, ACDSee, PS2, FrontPage, TurboTax... and more.

Poor QC on the part of Nikon at a minimum. I will hang in there and hope for a better NX2.01

 

[jim hughes]

Tomas, Firefox 2 has a reputation (not sure if it's deserved) as a memory hog with a serious memory "leakage" issue. Even with the amount of memory you have, I'd turn off Firefox. I've also heard that Firefox 3 fixes some of those problems.

Outlook (if you do mean Outlook and not Outlook Express) is a very large application that could tie up a lot of memory.

tomTom, yes I've also heard that XP can only manage 3GB and I could believe that 4GB installed might cause problems. But I wonder if they addressed that in XP SP3. This page on MSDN claims that XP can use 4GB.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

Here's something else interesting from MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613473(VS.85).aspx
It seems to say that applications really only get 2GB, unless you make the configuration change described in the article. If true, this could have a big affect on NX, on systems with 4 GB.

 

[Bill N]

Running XP on about 4 year old Emachine. <2 gigs ram. 64 bit 1.8 GHz AMD. NX 1.3.4. All of Tom's updates applied. As a "casual" user I have never had it crash. It doesn't seem to "hang" any more than LR1 or LR2 does from time to time. I almost feel guilty about how much I enjoy the program when I hear some of the stories here. Good luck to all in getting to where you want to be with NX!

 

[Alig]

I'm really new to any of the capture programs....so I'm really just learning it, from the beginning....I'm loving the results much better from NX2 than CR.

Yesterday while *trying* to process images, one at a time, I was getting the *out of memory* error....Lost a couple good conversions.
I ended up emptying the cache after every conversion, to keep NX2 happy, not locking up, or crashing the computer. I also had to push the cache limit way up too. Also rebooted NX2 after every one or two images conversions.

I think I know why this is happening......I have 3,000+ RAW files in the folder I'm working out of. I think it's getting bogged down with making ALL those thumbnails. I don't use them, so I wonder is there any way to disable thumnails? I think this could help a LOT!????

I guess I should just be shooting jpg for my high volume events......but I just love what I'm getting from my RAW files!!!!

I'm on XP pro on the computer I was having trouble with. I also run NX2 on my laptop with Vista.....this seems a bit better.

It seems slow on both computers. My machines are not slow machines, and are up to date on everything. I'm NOT a technical computer person, so I can't tell you what all is in them, but I know it's all good.

Don't know if I'm doing things right, but I'm getting by, barely.......Just seems to REALLY slow the workflow down having to empty cache and reboot the program after one or two conversions

Alissa

 

[Mike Buckley]

My machines are not slow machines, and are up to date on everything. I'm NOT a technical computer person, so I can't tell you what all is in them, but I know it's all good.

Alissa, I'm absolutely convinced that only a techie and only the best techies can assuredly know whether everything on a computer is in the user's best interest. You might want to check out Tom's tutorial posted in the sticky thread at the top of the Capture NX forum if you haven't already done so. The results might help alleviate at least some of your issues as they have for so many of us.

 

[soxOZ]

I have a Core 2 Duo E6750-2.66Gb CPU, 4Gb DDR2 800 Ram (ASUS M/B & Graphx Card)
and run a dual boot system with XP Pro x32 bit with the /3Gb switch and XP Pro x64 bit.
I run both the virtual memory and Nikon Cache on separate HDD from the OS (I have 4 HDD in the box - 2x320 Gb & 2 500Gb sata II drives).

Whether I'm lucky or what, but I have found both NX & NX2 run quite fast on both x32 & x64 bit and have never had a crash from it.
I also run a memory manager (TuneUp) that keeps the memory clean...
You watch, now that I have said this it will probably play up on me... LOL...

 

[TomaS]

Eureka! I now know how to make my fortune. Sell pre-configured NX2 PCs loaded all the 'proper' software and hardware fixes installed. Of course, you are not allowed to run any other programs at the same time, but that is minor inconvenience. Think of the dedicated word processor machines of the 80's. That's the ticket!:biggrin:

 

[MikeT]

Being new to NX2, I only process selected photos one at a time. I have had only three random crashes so far. Two of the crashes were of the type "This program has stopped responding" message. The other crash was during an attempt to select an image from the explorer in which I moved the scroll bar down to the bottom fairly fast. I got a big red "X" in the explorer window instead of my photos.

My vista sp1 machine is six months old with a 3 gig duo core processor, 4 gig of ram, two seperate 500 gig hard drives, an external 320 gig hard drive. NX2 cache and windows pagefile is located on the second hard (D) drive.



The only windows application log entries I could find are:

7/11/2008
Faulting application Capture NX 2.exe, version 2.0.0.0, time stamp 0x480d9732, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x00000000, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00000000, process id 0x%9, application start time 0x%10.


7/17/2008 - Application hang.
Faulting application Capture NX 2.exe, version 2.0.0.0, time stamp 0x480d9732, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a7a6, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x000681cb, process id 0x%9, application start time 0x%10.


I couldn't find any other log entries.


On the next crash or hang, I'll make it a point to check the log file for any additional info.


MikeT