Extremely slow AI spot removal on Windows
Description of Issue
AI spot removal in Lightroom Desktop for Windows is extremely slow compared with the same type of operation on my MacBook Air M4.
On my Windows PC, removing 11 small spots takes approximately 51 seconds. Removing around 30–40 small spots takes more than three minutes. On my MacBook Air M4, the same type of operation takes only a few seconds.
My PC has an NVIDIA RTX 5070 with 12 GB VRAM, an Intel Core i5-14600K, and 32 GB RAM. I would expect substantially better performance on this hardware.
Lightroom Desktop Version Number (Help > System Info…)
Lightroom 9.6 x64 [20260923-1659-a32d844] (September 23, 2026).
Internal Camera Raw version: 18.7 [2743].
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, 11.5 GB reported VRAM. Lightroom reports the GPU as loaded and supported, with compute support enabled.
If your version was purchased from the Mac App Store, please indicate that as well.
Not applicable. This issue occurs in Lightroom Desktop for Windows.
OS Version Number
Windows 11 Pro.
Camera Model (sometimes necessary)
Not camera-specific. The issue occurs while editing images in Lightroom Desktop.
Step-by-step Reproduction Instructions
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Open an image in Lightroom Desktop for Windows.
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Select the Remove tool and enable AI removal.
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Identify 11 small spots on the image.
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Remove the spots individually, using the same method for each.
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Measure the total time required to complete the operations.
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Repeat the same type of task on my MacBook Air M4 for comparison.
The Expected Result
AI spot removal should perform efficiently on my Windows PC, given its hardware specifications, without a substantial performance disadvantage compared with my MacBook Air M4.
The Actual Result
Removing 11 small spots takes approximately 51 seconds on my Windows PC. Removing around 30–40 spots takes more than three minutes. The same type of operation takes only a few seconds on my MacBook Air M4.
Troubleshooting Already Performed
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Updated Lightroom from version 9.1 to 9.6.
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Updated/tried the NVIDIA Studio Driver.
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Tested with only one monitor connected.
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Tested different GPU acceleration settings. Disabling GPU image processing caused noticeable interface lag and did not provide a practical solution.
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Reset Lightroom preferences.
The performance issue persists.
I would appreciate an investigation into why AI removal is so much slower on my Windows PC than on my MacBook Air M4, including whether there is a problem with GPU utilisation or AI processing in Lightroom Desktop for Windows.
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