Lightroom classic’s CPU usage

After seeing this I was curious why I have the Nikon Tether plugin since I shoot Sony and don't recoginze this plugin as being one I've installed.

By @John3266658772wv

So, why re you placing your posting in as a reply in this particular discussion? Your issue is not at all related.

Please post your own discussion.

The answer is very very simple, in favct obvious,  but, why support such lousy behavoir.

First up, that GPU driver is extremely out of date. A good three years out of date. You have v456.71, at NVIDIA v546.01 is shown as current Studio Driver. (NVIDIA recommends Studio as opposed to GameReady drivers for creative users as opposed to Gamers)

You should have an NVIDIA application on your computer called GeForce Experience. Use it to check for and upgrade that driver. Select Studio Drivers as default, and select Custom for install type as to force a clean install.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQpA88NAGmY

In the Adobe support pages, Out of date GPU drivers is always mentioned as important to fix.

Second up, your CAmera RAW CACHE is pathetically low, set to the default of 5 Gb, Consider increasing to at least 20 GB

Yes, that did use 100%. Are there certain functions that utilize 100% and others that don't?

By @Flagg37

Yes, but unfortunately the list of GPU-accelerated features on the Lightroom Classic GPU FAQ is not very specific. We kind of have to follow Lightroom release notes to know which is which at any given point in time. For example:

Lightroom 6 had little or no GPU acceleration.

Lightroom Classic 7 (I think) added more GPU acceleration to some Develop features, but most of the rest of the application was CPU-bound.

Lightroom Classic 11.4 added GPU acceleration to Export.

GPU acceleration has been added to other bits and pieces of Lightroom Classic, but it’s hard to know which ones exactly.

So GPU acceleration is currently available unevenly. You get it for export, but not for preview building, so preview building can still unfortunately still drive all available CPU cores to 100%, and does not currently make use of a powerful GPU.

It’s natural to think that CPUs should be maxed out, but when better hardware options are available, 100% CPU usage is a bug, not a feature. For example, GPU-accelerating Lightroom export not only cut export times by a significant percentage when I measured it, but by taking it off the CPU, the CPU can drop power consumption and generate less waste heat. This means it is no longer in danger of thermal throttling due to high temperature, and the cooling fans can stay at a lower, quieter speed. These power and heat considerations are especially important when working on a laptop.

Any time a more efficient hardware coprocessor is available, whether that’s a GPU or other hardware acceleration (e.g. H.264/265 for video, or the hardware AI processing accelerators found in Nvidia or Apple Silicon), it’s going to process compatible formats faster, with less power consumption and heat, than maxing out CPU cores. The notion that hardware acceleration can process faster/cooler than brute force 100% CPU is relatively well known to video editors and 3D artists, who have long had to deal with extended rendering of hundreds or thousands of frames/objects. But many photographers are just starting to understand this, because only recently have photography data loads gotten big enough for hardware acceleration to make a difference, for example a frame with 50+ megapixels, bulk import/export of hundreds of images, and now AI processing.