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franciscon16250367
franciscon16250367
Participating Frequently
April 8, 2017
Answered

Lightroom is very slow on high-end PC.

  • April 8, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 3457 views

Okay, I have read plenty of other forums before posting, including ones published by Adobe themselves obviously. I have tried every single fix mentioned. First off, my specs are fine, but you can find those below. For brevity's sake, it's an professional-grade custom PC on Windows 10. To name just a few off the top of my head: I've tried running LR with GPU acceleration enabled or disabled, no difference (although GPU is confirmed to be supported). I have 150GB of cache, didn't seem to matter. LR Software, cache, photos, and catalog are on a prosumer-grade SSD with plenty of extra space. Tried forcing app to run in dual-core, (but reverted back to multi-core when that killed my performance even worse).

No matter what I do, Lightroom is very slow. Rendering is fast enough I suppose, but developing is so sluggish. I render 1:1 previews before starting every new job, and it's doesn't even seem to matter. Adding radial filters, using the adjustment brush, straightening angles, and even adjusting exposure takes multiple seconds to see and register every change, I can't afford to work like this. By the way, my collections aren't thousands-deep, just a lit over a hundred photos at a time. Not sure if that'd matter or not.

I have seen tons of forum posts with users having the same issue as me despite many having similar to higher-spec PC's. My co-worker uses Lightroom 5 on an outdated Macintosh, and it runs much better than it does on my modern system with modern software. I don't get it? Is there something I'm missing here? Because I really don't want to be another one of those people who talk smack and say that Adobe doesn't care to streamline & optimize due to lack of competition.

SYSTEM SPECS:

  • Intel i7 6700K at 4.3GHz
  • 16GB Performance RAM in dual channel mode at 3200MHz
  • nVidia GTX 970 (updated graphics drivers regularly)
  • SSD's
  • Windows 10 Pro
  • Single Acer Predator XB1 2560x1440 Monitor

Temperatures are just fine, memory, disk, and processor utilization never surpass a 50% load, even during long and intensive renders. Another note: Adobe Photoshop, and Premier Pro run pretty much great, I don't have any problem with these applications holding me up. If I can edit 4K video without proxy files, I should be well-equipped to handle to some pretty basic photo development.

Any help would really be appreciated, please and thank you.

-Frankie

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Just Shoot Me

    No don 't do that. I was speaking about CPUs that have more than 4 Physical cores. Since your only has 4 you shouldn't, Should NOT, try to disable any of them.

    Try turning off the GPU option on the Performance tab of the LR Preferences.

    Also go into the Advance Power options of Windows and set your system to run at Max Performance to see if that helps.

    2 replies

    G
    gadgetgeek2000
    Known Participant
    April 8, 2017

    What is your display resolution? I picked up a 50" 4K tv that I use as a monitor. When plugged into my laptop, Lightroom is wickedly slow. I usually edit at 1920x1080 on the laptop display and Lightroom isn't bad. As a test, you might try to lower your resolution and see what happens.

    franciscon16250367
    franciscon16250367Author
    Participating Frequently
    April 8, 2017

    My monitor is 1440p, which according to my research on LR shouldnt be too much of a factor, I have also tried setting lower preview settings as recommended to no avail.

    Just Shoot Me
    Just Shoot Me
    Legend
    April 8, 2017

    Does your CPU have more than 4 cores? If it does LR doesn't work correctly with CPUs that have more than 4 cores. There is a way to limit LR to use only 4 cores, although I don't have a link to it.

    Once you do that it will run faster.

    franciscon16250367
    franciscon16250367Author
    Participating Frequently
    April 8, 2017

    The 6700K is hyper-threaded so it has 8 logical cores, and 4 physical cores. I will try disabling 4 of the other threads and see how that works, thanks for the tip!

    Just Shoot Me
    Just Shoot Me
    Legend
    April 8, 2017

    Okay, thanks for the info though,

    GPU off/ on doesn't seem to make a difference as mentioned in the post unfortunately. I've choosen to keep GPU acceleration off though because I've heard it doesn't do much for people who are on monitors under 4K.

    Yeah, that power options Max performance trick is one of the first things I do upon Windows installs. I just checked and it's still set to max performance.


    If you can check the BIOS/EFI settings as some contain a setting to limit the CPU speed. It is usually something like Intel Speed Step.

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