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SPfoto
Known Participant
October 8, 2025
Question

Are preset previews generation speed highly dependent on GPU?

  • October 8, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 212 views

I have not new but good RTX 2080ti card, and it's always a question how this or that thing depends on GPU.

My camera gives about 50Mp photos, and with "heavy" Lightroom or ACR presets it takes 1-2 second or more to generate preview when I scroll my presets and test what looks better. Could it be faster "on the fly" if I replace my GPU to something top like RTX 5090? Or it will be faster but something like 20-30% faster, that is not enogh for the price of new GPU.

1 reply

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 8, 2025

It used to be that preview generation was all CPU-based. That changed with Lightroom Classic 14.5, which was released only two months ago. If you’re using version 14.5 or later, your GPU might be able to help accerate preview generation. You’ll find a new option in Preferences / Performance called “Use GPU for Preview Generation.” If you set this to Auto, Lightroom Classic should GPU-accelerated preview generation if it sees 16GB of graphics memory or more. If your computer has less than 16GB of graphics memory (which is true for most computers today), you can set that to On to enable GPU acceleration anyway, but the amount of performance improvement will depend on how close your available graphics memory is to 16GB.

 

This is the Adobe web page about GPU-accelerated previews:

Use GPU for Preview generation

 

On my laptop, enabling GPU acceleration for previews cuts the time by 1/3 or more depending on the edits applied to the images. (My laptop is a Mac so its GPU is not directly comparable to PC graphics cards.)