Laptop spec for working with photos

[pcolbeck]

So I have a stack of ageing Leonovo Thinkpads and a P710 workstation. One extreme to the other really, ageing I5s with weak graphics and a 28 I7 core workstation with a graphics card that was very very expensive when new. In reality the workstation is dedicated to running LAN emulation software and not very portable. I dont play games so haven't bothered with anything wizzy for ages.
So I am looking for a laptop that will deal with photo manipulation with ease. I will be using DigiKam and Darktable on Linux.

I have tried it on an X1 Carbon 1st gen which is an I5 with 8Gb ram and its glacial with RAW files.

Anyone any idea on what spec is sufficient for this kind of thing?

[ian]

While 2D stuff will mostly be handled by the CPU, I don't think anything recent should struggle. I can spin and process huge print-quality images in realtime on an iMac with a quad-core i5 without it breaking a sweat.

Raw files from modern cameras are big, so eat up memory and there's probably a fair amount of caching to disk, so plenty of memory and an SSD. The software needs to be optimised to make the best use of the CPU and GPU, no idea what's that like with Linux, Photoshop and Affinity use exciting-sounding things like Metal acceleration on GPU. Raaaaaawk!

[citoyen]

I regularly use my Macbook for manipulating large image files in photoshop and it hardly ever seems to break sweat.

It’s not a particularly high spec model.

[philip]

I'm no expert here, but darktable will use the GPU if it is OpenCL compatible: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darktable_and_opencl.html

Here are some benchmarks showing how much GPU support can matter: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=darktable-opencl-gpu&num=3