Discussion about AMD vs Intel core count and performance issues

Question

Hello all, I'm doing some research and trying to gather as much information as possible on the popular (for all the wrong reasons) topic of Core Count VS Performance.

As a lot of you probably know, using more than 4 cores can cripple some peoples lightroom performance. Everything I have read on here seems to be about intel CPUs with 6 or more cores but I haven't seen much or anything about AMD CPUs with 6 or more cores.

A couple of you advised me not to risk getting a 6 core CPU but the new Ryzen 5 1600 6C/12T is very very appealing as an upgrade.

So my question/discussion is, does anyone using a high core count CPU of the AMD variety have these crippling lightroom issues? One guy on YouTube uses an R7 1800X 8C/16T and he said he's never had any slowdown issues.

My other point of interest is of those who do have the performance issue regardless of CPU brand, how many have limited lightroom to only detect and use 4 cores? I'd like to know both positive and negative experiences please.

Any indication of Adobe actually working towards a fix?

dj_paige · Answer

The only thing I can advise you is that this is a complicated issue, with many factors, including hardware, the size of your images in megapixels (not megabytes), the size of your monitor in pixels, and the types of editing you do.

One thing that seems to bring a lot of computers to a crawl is if you perform lots of brushing and/or lots of spot healing on each photo, turning on lens corrections/transforms with brushing and/or spot healing slows things down further, while using 4K or larger monitor and large image sizes (let's say 24 MP or larger). Doesn't seem to matter if you have a fast processor and or not, people report poor performance.

So, to be very specific, if you're going to request the information above, you also need to know the other issues I mentioned (monitor size, image size, editing that is done) in order to evaluate the situation. If someone just says I have processor X and my Lightroom runs fine, that's an incomplete piece of information. If someone says I have processor Y, and my Lightroom is unusably slow, that's an incomplete piece of information.

And to complicate things even further, many people suspect that there are issues that no one has pinpointed yet, causing poor performance.

My own information: i7-4770K, 16 GB RAM, standard HD monitor, 16 megapixel RAW images, only small amounts of brushing and spot healing, Lightroom runs fine.

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