GPU acceleration not working in latest Release

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
October 14, 2025
3 replies
1076 views

Hi, in the latest version 14.5.1 the GPU shoud accelerate previews and exports. However, my Nvidia 5070 TI with 16 GB Ram is ideling with 1-15% during previews and export although it is enabled in the lightroom settings. CPU (i9-9900KF) is running at 80%.

How can I enable lightroom to use the brand new GPU?

Windows

johnrellis

Legend

There are many parts of building previews that can't be effectively executed on the GPU -- reading the original photo from disk, parsing it, interpreting the develop settings and preparing them for execution on the GPU, writing the results to disk, updating the database indexing the previews. Similarly for exporting.

What's more important than relative GPU/CPU utilization is whether you get a significant speedup when the option Preferences > Performance > Use GPU For Preview Generation is enabled. I just tested on my Macbook Pro 2023, and building standard-sized previews for 250 raws from diverse cameras goes 1.76 times faster with the GPU enabled (16.4 photos/sec versus 9.3 photos/sec). (The raws were stored on an internal SSD.)

Exporting those raws goes 3.3 times faster (0.86 sec/photo versus 3.8 sec/photo).

What numbers do you observe?

E

Emilia34645157h2zwAuthor

Participating Frequently

Previes are generated 2 times faster with GPU than w/o. But giving the fact, that the CPU is not the newest, this is not great. Raws are stored on a raid array with a server high performance raid controller.

johnrellis

Legend

Generating previews of a R5 (raw) is only about 0,5 photos per second with the GPU enabled with the latest driver that came out yesterday... Previews are generated on an RAID0 with two M.2 SSDs.

I was expecting that the GPU is used similar to Premiere Pro, where ist is very often nearly 100% utilized.

@Emilia34645157h2zw: "Generating previews of a R5 (raw) is only about 0,5 photos per second with the GPU enabled"

That does seem slow. Given that the GPU speeds it up by 2x (which is what others observe) suggests the limiting factor isn't the GPU but elsewhere.

1. Do you have Preferences > Performance > Generate Previews In Parallel enabled? If not, enable it and redo the timing.

"Previews are generated on an RAID0 with two M.2 SSDs.:"

R5 and R5 M2 raws average about 50 - 55 MB each, so LR in theory should be able to read the raws much faster from that volume than 2 secs/photo.

2. Is this a network-attached or direct- attached volume?

3. Rule out issues with that volume by doing a quick experiment: Copy 100 raws to the local C drive and add them in place to a new temporary catalog. How long does LIbrary > Previews > Build Standard-Sized Previews take after discarding all the previews?

"I was expecting that the GPU is used similar to Premiere Pro, where ist is very often nearly 100% utilized."

LR presents a much different workload than Premier Pro. LR is applying a very complicated export rendering pipeline to individual photos, each with its own develop settings, while PP is doing relatively simple, repetitive video operations on a stream of frames, on GPUs that have video-optimized functionality.

Also, note that the issue of displaying GPU utilization in the Task Manager is fairly complicated, and Task Manager's graphs may not always a very good picture of what's going on:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/gpus-in-the-task-manager/

A

AxelMatt

Community Expert

Check if you have buldin a CPU with an internal graphic processor. If yes, disable the processor internal graphic card. The internal GPU can sometimes caused several issues. Open the Windows Device Manager, right-click the card's name and choose Disable.

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI