Performance Feedback Needed: i7-7700 and i7-8700 Systems

I've been using the new i7-8700K six core system extensively with LR and PS over the past two weeks.I have yet to see slowdown of ANY operation including applying a large number of Spot Removal Clone and Heal spots. Absolutely a joy!

I had a discussion today with Adobe Engineer Simon Chen, Principal Computer Scientist. He confirmed LR 7.2 and higher has been updated to better utilize six or more core processors. This includes Import, Preview Building, Export, and Develop module operations. However, extensive Adjustment Brush and Spot Removal applications may still slow down LR system performance. This is due to the overhead required for nondestructive editing and not something Adobe is able to address satisfactorily at this time. When extensive local editing is required the best option is to use ‘Edit in Photoshop.’ You can also use the Range Mask controls with the Adjustment Brush, Radial Filter, and Graduated Filter to better “localize” the edits using fewer brush spots. Simon mentioned he personally uses both eight-core and 16-core (physical cores) Windows systems and LR's performance scales up well on both.

I'll be researching available i7-8700K Windows 10 systems. If anyone's interested I'll post some of the units I find that have good base specs for LR usage. I'll be looking for i7-8700K systems with at least a 1TB SSD, 3TB HDD, 32 GB Memory, and an Nvidia P2000 Quadro graphics card.

running two NEC PA-272-Ws, About 266-x1440 PIXELS I only use them both in LR occasionally, but doing that causes no issues.

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Todd+Shaner  wrote dj_paige   wrote I am going to be buying a new computer as well ... and I am strongly considering the i7-8700k processor. Two of the links you gave refere to Xeon processors and as far as I know, that was an issue specific to Xeon and not related to the broader base of Intel processors. The other does talk about a 6-core processor, but again it is my understanding (I can't seem to find the exact link) that whatever problem LR used to have with 6 processors or more is now gone, that 6 core processors are definitely working well now, that Adobe has fixed this. That's the issue. I can't find anything in the Adobe forums or blogs that clearly states specific performance updates have been applied that now allow six-core processors to exhibit good performance. The consensus in the past (pre LR Classic 7.0) was to use the fastest quad-core processor you could afford. This was due to the large number of users reporting poor LR performance with high-end systems using 6, 8, 10, and 12 core processors.

I thought I had read this somewhere, but could not find the link. So, yes, I am in the "same boat" as you. There is this from about 1 year ago, but I don't really know what it means: Lightroom with i9 or Ryzen CPU? as Adobe likes to be vague on these matters.

In fact, we really have had very little guidance from Adobe with regards to hardware since Eric Chan told us about how the new LR 6 would make use of GPUs, and that's a long time ago in software years.

So I like your new thread to hear from people who have bought computers recently (say in the last year) where they describe their hardware, and their workflow, and if Lightroom runs well or not. The problem with this forum (and most other forums) is that we only hear from users when things are not working. Such a thread (a database, if you will) could be invaluable to others. Most existing threads don't provide enough information on the hardware, and often don't include the workflow, which can also result in very poor performance if lots of brushing and/or lots of spot healing is done. It is my opinion that Lightroom doesn't perform well on 4K or larger monitors if there is a lot of spot healing and/or a lot of brushing, and this is the cause of a lot, but not all, of the performance problems reported; but if anyone has other experiences, please speak up, especially positive experiences.

Agreed, but again there are a large number of users with high-end systems reporting slow scrolling and screen updates when making adjustments in the Develop module. Most of these systems use multiple SSDs, which should eliminate disk transfer-speed from the equation.

I simply am not concerned with disk speed or disk transfer speed causing slowness in the Develop module. I believe that Ian Lyons has put that to rest.

Will an SSD Improve Adobe Lightroom Performance? | Computer Darkroom

I'm looking for input from users who currently run LR on these two "best value" processors with LR 7.5 and the most recent 8.0 versions. It's a shame Adobe doesn't provide input on processor requirements similar to what they provide for GPU. Understandably it would be very bad press from a marketing perspective for Adobe to "officially" recommend using only lower performance processors with LR. So we users can only establish this information based on input from other users reporting here and in other forums.

I agree. Let's hear from users with new computers.