# Performance of LR 6/CC with Hardware acceleration



## lightroomer (Apr 26, 2015)

Hi,

I have a very fast computer which owns a fast SSD, 8 GB RAM (1600er), a fast overclocked Intel Core i7 4770k and an external AMD 5570 graphics card.

I appreciated that adobe has worked on the LR's performance since I have very huge raw files (36 MP). Nevertheless, I was very disappointed from the performance with hardware acceleration enabled. For me it is no difference at all. Another user in another thread wrote that he had disabled HDMI audio and experienced a huge performance gain. I do not.

I want to start a poll, where I want to know more about your experience. Please feel free to write your experiences down here also.


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 26, 2015)

I've ticked the top box, not so much for any performance benefit when developing an image (though there may be when getting into serious brush work), but rather from the benefit that derives from the fact that the GPU is additionally used to cache the develop previews. This means that when switching back to recent images in Develop there's a good chance that the image will still be in the GPU cache, so there's virtually no loading time. I'm typically seeing between 6-8 images cached, which is way better than the 1 or 2 that LR5 caches.


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## clee01l (Apr 26, 2015)

While I use the GPU switch, the areas of performance gain  that I experience are not related to using the GPU (AFAIK)


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 26, 2015)

AFAIK, the GPU is only used in Develop, and you can see when it's in use via the spinner graphic just to the left of the Toolbar selection dropdown arrow.


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## happycranker (Apr 27, 2015)

Perhaps the poll should differentiate between MAC and PC as well?


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## clee01l (Apr 27, 2015)

happycranker said:


> Perhaps the poll should differentiate between MAC and PC as well?


Actually, I think the results will be probably meaningless. 

The answers are a perceived opinion, use of the GPU is limited to Development not including the adjustment tools and there are other areas where performance has improved that are not affected by the GPU used for acceleration.  Differentiation between brands of Video cards and the amount of VRAM available and the number and types of monitors employed can skew the perceived results.  I feel certain that monitors connected by VGA might be slower to render than HDMI, DIV-D the Thunderbolt.  Some monsters have built in caching and others don't.   There are too many variables to produce a consistent test.


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## Conrad Chavez (Apr 27, 2015)

Adobe's Eric Chan recently posted an informative overview of GPU support in the Adobe Lightroom forum: GPU notes for Lightroom CC (2015). You can get a pretty good idea of what to expect with various graphics cards. For example, he explains why enabling GPU support for an older or less capable graphics card might actually result in slower Develop performance than disabling GPU support for that card.

Personally, I've got an old Mac Pro desktop that I was thinking of getting rid of because Lightroom 5 was becoming slow in the Develop module. The graphics card in that desktop is relatively new, so to me the GPU support in Lightroom 6 was a godsend. Now the Develop module runs incredibly smoothly considering the age of the computer.


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## Roelof Moorlag (Aug 7, 2015)

Maybe this link about turning off the GPU preferences, even when crashing on startup is usefully for anyone?
http://lightroom-blog.com/2015/05/1...pu-preferences-even-when-crashing-on-startup/


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## GingeraMan (Jan 1, 2019)

So how is everyone finding GPU acceleration now?  I just picked up a GTX1060 6GB for my five year old PC, and I *think* it is faster.  If I am not mistaken, PC RAM usage is much less, which may help speed it up as I only have 16GB RAM which is always full when using Lightroom even after closing other applications.


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