Originally posted by ehrwien Thanks! The stacking itself wasn't that much of a deal. Tell the program what photos to use, and I just let it generate all the methods it offers. It took a few minutes and then I could compare the results. Pentium G4560 (2 cores/4 threads @ 3.5 GHz) and 16 GB of RAM.
I tried to stitch a panorama a few days ago, but because I had taken the pictures handheld I moved the camera too much between shots and got quite a few stitching errors with Microsoft ICE. Hugin would perhaps be able to correctly combine the shots, but I don't see how I can do that yet... so I tried to manually combine the 7 or so pictures I had taken (and exported as TIFFs) in GIMP. THAT made my computer stutter with everything I tried to do. I'm going to upgrade to a Ryzen 3600 or 3700X and 32 GB of RAM this month.
Interesting to hear your stacking experience. That's one I've yet to try.
As for stitching panos, I've had good results with MS ICE even with handheld images - provided that there is no moving water in the scene! If the commercial programs can overcome that limitation, that would be something.
Your new computer will be a powerhouse. It doesn't seem so long (1999) since I was excited to have a new computer with a Pentium III 500Mhz, a whopping 128Mb of RAM and an 8gb HDD. It also had a floppy disk drive. I placed the order by fax.