Forge does not multi-thread to take advantage of multiple cores on a computer because you get faster overall throughput by running multiple Forges and letting the operating system divide up the processing among the available cores.

We have run timing tests on a correctly handled original negative with a light dusting per frame, which is typical of most post production scans. Very dirty frames will increase compute times, especially if using motion estimation to detect dirt.

The machine we ran our timing tests on is a 2 X AMD Opteron Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) 2212 (4 cores in total), clocked at 2GHz, 4GB memory in total. The images are 2K (2048 x 1556) Northlight DPX scans, all stored on the local disk. The figures are for average overall throughputs when run on a sequence of 20 frames.

With pre-detected dirt (from an IR scan):

• Forge 1.1v3 32 bit 1 core - 9.0 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 1.1v3 32 bit 4 core - 2.7 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 32 bit 1 core - 7.0 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 32 bit 4 core - 2.0 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 64 bit 1 core - 5.6 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 64 bit 4 core - 1.7 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  

When using Forge's motion estimation to detect dirt:

• Forge 1.1v3 32 bit 1 core - 11.8 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 1.1v3 32 bit 4 core - 3.6 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 32 bit 1 core - 8.9 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 32 bit 4 core - 2.5 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 64 bit 1 core - 7.5 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Forge 2.0v1 64 bit 4 core - 2.1 seconds per frame
  
  
  
  
  
  

Forge computes everything at full 32bit floating point and therefore requires a 36MB per RGB 2K buffer and it uses many such buffers. So, the memory requirements are...

• when using pre-detected dirt on 2K plates forge has a peak memory requirement of about 400MB per forge per core, (eg: running 4 forges on a 4 core machine needs about 1.6 GB).
  
  
  
  
  
  
• when motion estimation to detect on 2K plates forge has a peak memory requirement of about 450MB per forge, (eg: running 4 forges on a 4 core machine needs about 1.8 GB).