That depends on what you are doing.  Printing, thumb, and raw building are all CPU intensive.  Printing speed benefits from more threads in particular because printing is not very memory intensive as most of the time is spent interpolating pixels which is done in small chunks (tiles) to be very efficient and these are split up among threads.  Raw building can be memory intensive if you are building raws from cameras with a high pixel count but QU already takes care of that by monitoring memory usage during raw (cache) development and only using the number of threads necessary.  But even with raw building, most of the job is CPU intensive with color channel interpolation and building the final image.

Example: On a 12 core/24 thread machine, printing a single 24x36 inch print took 27 seconds with 2020.109 (which supported up to 8 threads).  With 2020.110, the same print took 19 seconds to process; proportional to the extra threads (12).  Not particularly relevant for a single 24x36 inch print, but what if you had 10 of them to print?  Or 20?  Or a hundred 8x10 prints?

Mike

4 threads.    Old versions allowed up to 8 threads and 2020.110 allows up to 12.


The number of physical cores doesn't matter as much as supported threads.  QU shows on the splash screen how many cores and threads are supported on your system.  If it says 6 cores, 12 threads then you should run 12 threads if you want the fastest performance.  If it says 4 cores, 8 threads then you should run 8 threads for fastest performance.  If it just reports "4 cores", then your system doesn't use thread optimization and it supports 4 threads (same as the number of cores).  Leaving QU's Multi-threading settings on the default "Auto" setting takes care of all that.

Many of the latest high end consumer CPU's are 6/12, 8/16, or 12/24 cores/threads so 2020.110 will process prints, thumbs, and raws significantly faster on those systems.  Using more threads than you have physical cores makes sense if your system supports more threads than physical cores.  But using more threads than your system's thread count will have limited (if any) benefit and will render your system unusable for any task other than the one using those threads, meaning you won't be able to perform other tasks while waiting for the high thread-count task to finish because your high-intensity task is using all that the CPU supports.

Mike

Lots of people are talking about the new A.I. Gigapixel interpolation tool and reviews are popping up everywhere.  So naturally, I'm getting questions from Qimage users.  Questions like "Have you reviewed it?"  "How does it compare to Qimage's interpolation or other math based resampling?"  "If it's that good, should I just use it on ALL my photos prior to printing with Qimage?"  Or even, "I'm trying it but it's taking 30 minutes to resample one photo".

In this video, I do a quick and simple explanation of interpolation and go into what the A.I. interpolation is doing behind the scenes.  I look at some pros and cons of mathematical versus A.I. methods and do a lot of pixel-peeping to review results of the A.I. Gigapixel tool versus Qimage's fusion interpolation.

So if you want to geek out and do some pixel-peeping to see what this new interpolation tool has to offer, feel free to check out the video:

https://youtu.be/LGWEyG4DUOM

Regards,
Mike

...
Alain,

Differences in (any) interpolation will only show in extreme cases such as taking a low res photo and printing it large, but the improvements are:

- Cleaner results with less background noise
- Cleaner and sharper edges with less pixelization

The changes appear relatively minor even in large upsampling jobs, so why make them?  We want the data path from printing software to printer to produce the most accurate results possible: results that are faithful to the original photo.  The new Arithmetic Difference tool in the Best Shot Selector was used to fine tune the algorithm to more accurately upsample everything from photos to line art, producing the most data-accurate representation possible.  All this means for the average user is peace of mind: that your photos get to the printer as accurately as possible.  The visible difference will not be notice in "normal" printing at "normal" sizes.  But at least you know that when you DO want to stretch something big, it'll do the best job possible.

Regards,
Mike