NEW Topaz upsampling product: A.I. Gigapixel

[plugsnpixels]

5 years you might get a pass, but 10-! The SSD will actually help overall performance (I put one in a 2008 MacBook Pro with great general results), but perhaps not for cutting-edge imaging apps.

[JohnRostron]

My BIOS date is actually 2012. That took some discovering!

John

[Manfred M]

You will get a lot more value for money by upgrading to a SSD drive than in replacing your graphics card for a very niche product. I recently replaced my graphics card when it was no longer capable of running mainstream photo editing software and already had installed a SSD a few years earlier.

[plugsnpixels]

The SSD will indeed give a boost, but at some point the graphics card will have to be updated. If not for Gigapixel, then for something else on the horizon. Photoshop has been complaining about 2010 iMac GPUs for years now (in my experience at work).

[JohnRostron]

As I said, I do have Ben Vista, which should serve my needs for now. It does not seem to be worth investing in a new graphics card yet. My photo editor (Affinity) does not really use the graphics card.

John

[plugsnpixels]

Here's an interesting article about Adobe system requirements that I came across since posting my last comment.

Basically, for the most part we just need to keep moving forward hardware-wise, though there is still some life left in older rigs.

[Manfred M]

Photoshop has been complaining about 2010 iMac GPUs for years now (in my experience at work).

Eight year old hardware? That is definitely a pushing things a bit when it comes to using technology.

[plugsnpixels]

Indeed, and by some stroke of luck, we just replaced them with 162 2017 SSD iMacs ;-). That's how I spent my summer! All future-proofed (until the future arrives, as it always does).

[plugsnpixels]

I posted some new iPhone 6 upscaling tests.

[plugsnpixels]

A couple more 600% A.I. Gigapixel upsizing examples, with the results at right viewed at 100% (compared to a 600% blowup of the original pixels in Photoshop). Sorry these don't seem to enlarge to actual 1:1 size here on the forum.

The first is from a 1-megapixel source (Kodak DC265, taken 1999):



This 4-megapixel example is from a Minolta DiMAGE S404, taken January 2006:



The original full-frame images (reduced) are included for reference.

[plugsnpixels]

On another forum there was some talk of Topaz A.I. Gigapixel making it easy to grab and reuse web-sized images (for good or bad). So I did a test using my own website.

The home page image of the hawk (desktop version of the site) downloaded at 45kb (489x320px @ 72ppi). Here's what it looked like after a 600% uprez in Gigapixel (unretouched):