How much do graphics cards speed up new AI tools? Could Adobe provide this data?

[Kurt314159880d3c]

I had a new computer built for me a few years ago.  At that time there were no graphics cards available thanks to crypto currency miners. Lightroom ran great for me without the graphics card at the time. Now with the new AI tools "denoise" is taking me 17 minutes to run. I obviously need a graphics card, but can't find anyone who has tested different cards to try and help me understand how much this could reduce my processing time.

It would be great if Adobe could test the same image on the same computer with a couple options (e.g., no graphics card, 4060 card, and 4080 card) and show how much time this could reduce. This could help folks in the future know how much to invest to speed up the Adobe tools.  I am buying a 4060 card and hoping for the best. 

[johnrellis]

See this post for Denoise performance on various cards, collected by Linwood Ferguson (last updated 5/24/23):

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/my-recent-gpu-experience-gigabyte-nvidia-rtx-4070-t...

[Alan27574205nk75]

It woulkd be nice if there was an option to just use the cpu, I bought a new Intel NUC13 with I7 processor and 32gb memory and it takes 12 minutes with the gpu at 100% and the cpu at 1%. You can turn off the gpu in preferences but denoise still uses it. 

[Ian Lyons]

That's not going to happen as AI uses GPU and other extensions to same such as NVIDIAs Tensor cores and Apple Neural Engine.

> You can turn off the gpu in preferences but denoise still uses it. 

Turning Off the GPU has no affect the operation of the GPU. AI uses the GPU whether its enabled or disabled using the preference.

[johnrellis]

"It would be nice if there was an option to just use the cpu, I bought a new Intel NUC13 with I7 processor and 32gb memory and it takes 12 minutes with the gpu at 100% and the cpu at 1%. You can turn off the gpu in preferences but denoise still uses it."

The speed of Denoise varies greatly across graphics cards, with older and less-capable cards taking 10 - 100 times as long as newer ones. Please do the LR menu command Help > System Info and copy/paste the entire contents here so we can see exactly which versions of hardware and software LR thinks you're running and important LR options that are set. 

You can force LR to use the CPU for all AI commands by restarting your computer in Safe Mode With Networking.  While the AI masking commands generally run just 4-5x slower on the CPU instead of the GPU, Denoise will run roughly 50x slower.

[Conrad_C]

The benefit of a CPU-only option might be limited, or negative. The reason is that even a slow GPU result is often better than a no GPU result. For example, now that Lightroom Classic has GPU acceleration for exporting, one of my typical jobs finishes one-third faster on the GPU than it used to on the CPU, and the computer runs much cooler than if the CPU handles everything. In video editing applications, it’s the same: If GPU acceleration is shut off, the load on the CPU is so much higher than it takes significantly longer, and the computer runs hotter, causing the fans to come on fast and loud for that longer duration.

If it’s taking you 12 minutes with the GPU at 100%, if my other experiences are any indication, with CPU-only it could take 20 minutes and the computer will become a frying pan with airplane-like fan speeds and noise levels.