Virtual GPUs

[JonathanRyan]

It's a bit of a niche area, but with graphics cards vanishing from the face of the earth, has anybody looked at using virtual GPUs? AWS start at around £1 an hour for a machine with *serious* graphics capabilities. With suitable bandwidth you could probably get decent performance for editing. Or for a simpler option a Shadow box costs 12.99 a month and you can use it for pretty much what you want.

Upload your raws overnight, edit all day, hit the export and downloads your finals. No idea how screen calibration would work

 

[SFTPhotography]

Plenty of GPU's being designed for PC's/workstations with serious ability to. I'd hardly say graphics cards are a thing of the past.

I googled the shadow box thing - I suspect a very high speed, and reliable more to the point internet connection is in order.

Re image editing, I tend to do it over and over again, making minor tweaks later down the line. I wouldn't want that model of upload, work, export as I'd be exporting and downloading a lot.

 

[JonathanRyan]

Plenty of GPU's being designed for PC's/workstations with serious ability to. I'd hardly say graphics cards are a thing of the past.

Yes, reading my post I was a little unclear I meant the current drought - it's extremely hard to buy a decent GPU at the moment and those you can find are pricey.

I googled the shadow box thing - I suspect a very high speed, and reliable more to the point internet connection is in order.

Re image editing, I tend to do it over and over again, making minor tweaks later down the line. I wouldn't want that model of upload, work, export as I'd be exporting and downloading a lot.

It's designed for games and they claim it's designed for a minimum of 15mbps. As for the upload, work, export etc....it's really just like your own PC. Upload, work until you're happy and then save finals locally. Kind of the reverse of keeping your backups in the cloud.

I haven't checked if Shadow can access AWS - that would be a cheap place to store things and they give you a 1GB connection to the rest of the world so it could be limitless cheapish storage.

To save other people a Google..... Shadow - Your gaming PC powered by Cloud technology

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Let's just see if I've got this right...

1. Reach a point where you need additional speed to process data.
2. Extract the data and processing.
3. Send that data along a relatively slow internet connection to a remote location.
4. At the remote location, pick up the data and the processing code.
5. Execute the processing in a shared environment.
6. Send the results back across a relatively slow internet connection from a remote location.
7. Reintegrate the data into the processing.
8. Resume the local program.

 

[TCR4x4]

No shadow systems available until August. It was June last week, so they are obviously popular.

 

[JonathanRyan]

Let's just see if I've got this right...

1. Reach a point where you need additional speed to process data.
2. Extract the data and processing.
3. Send that data along a relatively slow internet connection to a remote location.
4. At the remote location, pick up the data and the processing code.
5. Execute the processing in a shared environment.
6. Send the results back across a relatively slow internet connection from a remote location.
7. Reintegrate the data into the processing.
8. Resume the local program.

That's one way of looking at it, here's another....

1. Don't spend 1500 - 2k on a powerful edit system - anything that can run Win10 will do even a £150 laptop.
2. Spend your money on renting (1) a virtual machine (2) high speed fibre - I have 600MB down and a measly 40 up I reckon I pay about £20 on top of what's reasonable to get that speed.
3. Cull your images on your £150 laptop - embedded jpegs will amke this quick
4. Upload the raws to cloud as a backup (which many people already do). This can happen oevernight
5. Pull them from cloud at gigabit speed (faster than many NAS), work on them on your VM, prep them for clients and either d/l or do a direct cloud transfer to target system.

£150 for a cheap beige box + £20 to upgrade your bandwidth + £12 a month for a Shadow box

vs £1500 for a decent editing rig (basically what mine cost + monitors) £32 a month will buy you a lot of months vs £1500 and when you need an upgrade you just switch to renting a new box. Also, my accountant says £32 is revenue cost and £1500 is capital expenditure

Plus if you need to edit pics on site (as I used to have to occasionally do when there was an on site...) you can just log into your VM from a Netbook and edit at full speed.

Just a thought.

No shadow systems available until August. It was June last week, so they are obviously popular.

Yeah, given the GPU drought it's not surprising gamers are thinking of this

 

[nandbytes]

That's one way of looking at it, here's another....

1. Don't spend 1500 - 2k on a powerful edit system - anything that can run Win10 will do even a £150 laptop.
2. Spend your money on renting (1) a virtual machine (2) high speed fibre - I have 600MB down and a measly 40 up I reckon I pay about £20 on top of what's reasonable to get that speed.
3. Cull your images on your £150 laptop - embedded jpegs will amke this quick
4. Upload the raws to cloud as a backup (which many people already do). This can happen oevernight
5. Pull them from cloud at gigabit speed (faster than many NAS), work on them on your VM, prep them for clients and either d/l or do a direct cloud transfer to target system.

£150 for a cheap beige box + £20 to upgrade your bandwidth + £12 a month for a Shadow box

vs £1500 for a decent editing rig (basically what mine cost + monitors) £32 a month will buy you a lot of months vs £1500 and when you need an upgrade you just switch to renting a new box. Also, my accountant says £32 is revenue cost and £1500 is capital expenditure

Plus if you need to edit pics on site (as I used to have to occasionally do when there was an on site...) you can just log into your VM from a Netbook and edit at full speed.

Just a thought.



Yeah, given the GPU drought it's not surprising gamers are thinking of this

What is it that you are editing and/or use for editting that requires such expensive computers?

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

That's one way of looking at it, here's another....

I think you are talking about remote processing, which is quite different and, if you're prepared to pay for it, quite practical. It's simply the latest variation on the time sharing systems that some of us used in the 1970s.

What I understood the original posting to be discussing was the use of a remote dedicated system to take over CPU intensive processing, as if the remote system were part of the local system. That's quite different and does not strike me as practical or cost effective for the sort of processing most photographers would wish to do.

 

[JonathanRyan]

What is it that you are editing and/or use for editting that requires such expensive computers?

Photoshop/Lightroom from 3-5 years in the future. If you buy a machine now then it really needs to be able to work performantly for at least 3 years.

I think you are talking about remote processing, which is quite different and, if you're prepared to pay for it, quite practical. It's simply the latest variation on the time sharing systems that some of us used in the 1970s.

Yes, nearly all companies are moving their heavyweight machines to the cloud as it's much cheaper/more cash efficient. I wondered if we'd reached the point where photographers could use it yet. Gamers can (if they can rent a box) and their requirements are often similar.

 

[nandbytes]

Photoshop/Lightroom from 3-5 years in the future. If you buy a machine now then it really needs to be able to work performantly for at least 3 years.

The laptop I picked on this forum for my brother for £360 can easily handle this:

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/dell-15-i7-7577-laptop.702061/

It probably will be fine for next 2-3 years.
It can play most games inc. latest ones according to my brother. I borrowed it briefly when I didn't have my computer just before Christmas and it worked fine with processing software too.

 

[SFTPhotography]

What is it that you are editing and/or use for editting that requires such expensive computers?

See if you use on1 RAW or C1Pro they can fully take advantage of GPU and are multi threaded - expensive computers aren't wasted on these - well a second GPU is wasted on on1RAW so you are better with 1x RTX5000 vs 2x RTX4000

 

[LongLensPhotography]

1. Cull your images on your £150 laptop - embedded jpegs will amke this quick

I see so many problems with this... so many problems. I won't even go there.

Seriously, stills editing is like the least resource intensive task for a PC right now, so you shouldn't need a £3k rig (not included an expensive high end fully calibrated screen)

All these services are probably for things like advanced 3D rendering, CAD and 8K video where you need something like 64 core 256GB monsters servers, and I would guess it is all command line input.