High Memory Usage - Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro

I mostly use Lightroom and Photoshop, but I post here too because I also use Premiere Pro.

I have not had a computer with less than 16GB RAM for many years now, and my desktop has had 32GB for a while. I think it was in Lightroom Classic 7 that Adobe put in some work to take advantage of computers with ample RAM and CPU cores. Lightroom typically needs 6GB or less of RAM to edit one raw image, but if there is more RAM available, Lightroom will attempt to improve performance by using the extra cores to cache previews of adjacent images in the folder (so that they show up faster as you go from image to image). And then it will use any extra RAM to cache those previews, because there is no memory faster than RAM. At that time they changed the system requirements  to support this. The current requirements for Lightroom say 4GB required, 12GB recommended.

Other factors affecting Lightroom: Performance tends to drop as the number of pixels to be processed goes up in both images and the display. I've actually been OK with Lightroom Classic performance on my quad-core i5, but I think it's because both my cameras are 20 megapixels or less, and my desktop displays are not 4K. The worst case scenario for performance seems to be high-megapixel raw images (24 megapixels and up) on very high resolution displays (4K, 5K). That is a lot of pixels to recalculate every time a slider gets moved. It got a little better when Lightroom added GPU support in the Develop module, but for a lot of users, it still isn't enough.

If the raw images are opened in Photoshop at 16 bits/channel, the one 12-bit or 14-bit single-channel raw image file is expanded into three 16-bit RGB channels, and if that is 24 megapixels and up plus layers and masks, that adds up to a lot of data to hold in RAM. Keep that open next to Lightroom and it's no wonder 12GB of RAM might not be enough. Remember that the OS needs a few GB just to run things, so the 8 or 9GB left is now divided between Lightroom and Photoshop, which is not ideal.

You didn't mention After Effects but it's another example of an application that tries to use extra RAM to help performance. It caches its RAM preview so you can hold a longer real-time preview in RAM before it has to hit the CPU again. I'm not sure of specific reasons that make Premiere Pro use more RAM.

You mentioned a 1TB hard drive. That may be a major bottleneck. For today's applications, hard drives are very slow. A SATA SSD is at least five times faster than a hard drive. Many new PC and Mac laptops now come with NVME SSD internal system drives; that type of storage is literally 25-30 times faster than a hard drive, the machines boot up in seconds, and everything is more responsive. No amount of defragging will make a hard drive as fast as that. Any SSD will do wonders for video and photo application scratch/cache/preview files. Even if just using hard drives, performance can be somewhat enhanced by setting up Premiere Pro preferences to spread out cache, preview, etc. files across multiple hard drives so read/writes can be done in parallel. Editing video using a single hard drive is unfortunately another worst-case scenario. (SSDs are so fast that it can be acceptable to edit on just one, depending.)

Another important storage factor is making sure there's always lots of free space on drives. If a drive gets too close to full, there's no place to put cache/preview/temp files, and a grinding halt is usually what happens. I aim for at least 100GB free on especially my system drive, but I try to leave a lot more.

The specific GPU model is not so important with Lightroom and Photoshop; what's important is that you have a relatively current one. For Premiere Pro the GPU is much more important.

If you're on a budget, try upgrading RAM to 16GB or more, and replacing hard drives with SSDs. When I replaced the hard drive with an SSD in my 2011 i7 laptop (a MacBook Pro), combined with an upgrade to 16GB RAM I did not need to buy a new laptop until 2018. Without those upgrades, it would have been too slow and abandoned earlier.

If that was (relatively speaking) a high-end MB, you'd have a point.

But that rig is nowhere near high-end. The 860 is an older nearly abandoned generation of GPU, and 12GB of RAM is barely above bare minimum operating requirements. You don't actually give the specific CPU, so I can't comment there.

That's an older and relatively speaking low level rig. Relatively to current standards.

Neil