P: GPU & Multiprocessor acceleration

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It would be great if Lightroom 4 had GPU support for CUDA enabled video cards similar to the Mercury Playback Engine in CS5. That would really speed up performance! Every couple of seconds helps when you are editing 1000s of files.

Saving 2 seconds between images comes out to be an hour of saved time when you are editing 2000 images. I have 12 GB of RAM, and 12 core processors at my disposal and sometimes i have 4 seconds between images.

Multiprocessor support would be great as well!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lightroom already supports multiple processors. But many of the compression methods used in camera RAW files do not lend themselves to parallel processing, slowing the pipeline.

A GPU is not a cure all, and can cause more problems than they solve (especially where some drivers are concerned).

It would be best to just list the problems you're seeing, and let the Lightroom engineers figure out the problem and best solutions.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thanks for your reply. Does anyone know if Lightroom 4 will offer GPU acceleration?

[Lee Jay]

Adobe isn't likely to release that type of information before release, but I sort of doubt it personally.

[J453]

GPU Support is not magic fairy dust that would make all aspects of Lightroom faster - there are things that GPU's simply aren't fast at. It would be better to tell us what things are slow and let the engineers find the correct technology/solution for the problem.

[areohbee]

Indeed. Some people have thought thumbnail scrolling jerkiness was due to GPU, but its not. One can grab between thumbs and scroll smoothly, its just the scroll-bar initiated scrolling that's jerky.

[Assaf Frank]

When exporting big raw files (60MP) it takes time... , is it a task for CPU or GPU?

[areohbee]

All CPU.

[J453]

Disk time factors in there a bit, too, when exporting.

See related:

Lightroom: System Configuration Recommendations

[StefanKlein]

I find, that LR does not react fast enough to slider adjustments. In comparison Capture One with Open CL enabled is really fast and smooth. So I can imagine the GPU could help LR as well. Am I wrong?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yes. A GPU is not a cure all, and can cause more problems than they solve (@#%$@#%$@# drivers).

It would be far better to list the problems you're seeing, and let the engineers on Lightroom figure out the problem and best solutions.

[StefanKlein]

Okay Chris, you want a concrete problem: LR reacts rather sluggish, if I drag any image adjustment slider. It`s just not smooth. And it gets worse, if you have already made some (local) adjustments. It gets worse, if you have enabled you secondary monitor view, maybe in LIVE mode or zoomed in or both. Also panning is not smooth at all, if you are zoomed in. Zooming is not smooth, also. Just everything, I see on screen, is not really fast and smooth. I compare it to Capture One with OpenCL enabled or to Photoshop`s screen redraw. Both are what I expect. Photoshop`s screen redraw is really, really great. It wasn`t until CS4, when it got GPU support. I use Windows7 64 bit, a Q6600/2,8Ghz, 8GB RAM, GTX470. Not the latest and greatest, but not THAT slow, either. But when I use LR, the program just does not feel "snappy". It`s fast in terms of finally rendering or exporting RAWs, no question. But things, that "happen on screen" feel slow: Scrolling in Grid mode, arranging images in Survey mode (stuttering, compared to Bridge`s preview(?) panel), onscreen response to slider adjustments, panning, zooming. And all this just makes the program feel slow.
I can only make a comparison to Capture One, where many, many things speed up noticably as soon as OpenCL is enabled.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thank you for defining the problem. Now the Lightroom engineers can look into it and see what is going on.

If in doubt: define the problem, and let the engineers figure out the best solutions. Suggesting a solution without a well defined problem tends to get the suggestion ignored.

[hungchi]

I agree that we need GPU accelleration in LR. I also agree The Murcury playback engine comparison is a good one, since MPE is a rendering engine. This will not save time for everyone, But there are many people who do lots of local adjustments which are more rendering intensive.

LR would benifit from GPGPU accelleration for anything that would be rendering intensive: Local adjustments, noise reduction, lens distortion correction, slider adjustments, 1:1 preview creation, etc. It should be possible to increase performance for those people by pushing the rendering to the GPU, as is done with MPE.

OpenCL would likely be prefered over CUDA since more people would be able to benifit from the implimentation of openCL based GPGPU. But since Adobe has allready Implemented one CUDA based project, MPE, they might be able to use their CUDA skills to implement GPGPU in LR faster than if they attempted GPGPU with OpenCL.

[sungax]

GPU CUDA Acceleration for rendering image previews, exporting images, viewing the map, merging images into pano's, making image adjustments, zooming in and out and playing video etc, in Lightroom 4.

If the GPU can do it better than the CPU, then have it GPU accelerated. In fact, it would be a good idea to have all of adobe's products be GPU accelerated!

I'd like to see Lightroom 4 make use of GPU processing. Similar to the Mercury Playback engine in Premiere Pro CS5.5

GPU acceleration should be available for ALL CUDA enabled GPU's.

I absolutely love GPU acceleration & Mercury Playback engine in Adobe Premiere Pro. It really helps to speed up real-time previewing of high resolutuon footage.

I am sure that GPU acceleration will speed up any professionals workflow.

Here is the thread that many people want it for Lightroom 4!

http://forums.adobe.com/message/41647...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Again, you're putting the solution ahead of the problem. Tell the Lightroom team where performance is a problem, and let them figure out the problems and best solutions.

(odds are that GPU usage would introduce more problems, and limiting acceleration to a single brand of GPU simply would not cut it)

[VeloDramatic]

My number one target for performance improvement would be preview generation, particularly in the Develop module. I don't want to see that spinning indicator (ever)

------------------Future related improvement ----------------------
Perhaps in LR5 you could give us an option to specify whether we wanted the GPU accelerated process to build true Develop module previews and not Library previews. The latter is the consequence of LR's assumption of a Linear workflow moving from Library to Develop. I (and I suspect others) would like the option to work efficiently in the opposite direction. I'd rather LR processing cycles (on import) were building the Develop previews I'm ultimately going to need to make my processing-influenced selections. Or you could give us the UI customization facility to combine the best of the two modules to best suit our individual workflows.

[hungchi]

Chris, I agree many people are just expecting GPU acceleration to be some kind of fairy dust that will suddenly make LR much faster. I think this is mostly due to the significant performance increase achieved in Premiere with GPU acceleration of Rendering. Personally I think there are several current performance issues in LR3 and LR4 beta (still sluggish in LR5.3) that could benefit from GPGPU assistance, or at the minimum performance enhancements. Rendering of 1:1 previews is fairly slow, as is the conversion of RAW files to DNG. Additionally it is a known issue that as the number of local adjustments on an image increases the performance of LR decreases due to an increase in rendering load.

All of those issues could be addressed by GPGPU

[Lee Jay]

There are no Develop previews. There is the Camera Raw cache, that can be populated during the regular preview building process, but that's it.

[VeloDramatic]

That's exactly why I'm asking for them as a new feature in LR5 AND as a candidate for GPU acceleration

[drholliday666]

CUDA acceleration, while it's isn't the end all-be all, would help with some of the mathematical functions. LR is still sluggish on my box, not as snappy as it should be. My Visual Studio 2010 is sluggish too, but that's understandable as the debugger is hooked to every process. But, LR shouldn't be. clicking on each image, the spin indicator for Loading will sometimes appear for up to 2 seconds per image. With Dual Xeon X5470 Quad Core 3.33GHz, 12M cache procs and 32GB of RAM, Quadro FX3700 and 12x 15K 300GB SAS drives in a stripe, it shouldn't EVER show that indicator. But, it does.

The ATTO benchmark shows the drive READ speeds at over 750MB/s and WRITES are 500MB/s, and in frame testing on the video, I can get 600-1100fps, so the hardware shouldn't be a bottleneck. In many of the imaging apps I've written (mostly for medical radiographic/DICOM), large images (1.5GB+ files) are still rendering in 3-5 seconds, but my app uses the CUDA extensions for some of the calculations.

GPU acceleration could be useful...unless you get the people with their cheap GeForce cards with very few CUDA cores - it'll actually slow down rendering. Even with the FX380 Quadro, having CUDA doesn't mean that it's better - but it would be nice to be able to enable the GPU and make our own decisions on whether it's helping or hurting!

[Tron777]

LR4 is very slow compared to LR3 - GPU support is not a may have but a must have;
like my NIK plugins - they run fast in GPU mode and 10-25x slower without GPU accelelaration using the 8 Cores of my mac Pro
cheers
/Karl

[Scott_Martin_]

Lightroom 4 is so much slower than it's predecessor that it can really kill the creative process - even on a brand new, super fast, loaded up i7 Mac or PC. Is the GPU fully utilized? Speedy switching between the Library and Develop modules is particularly important. I'd put up with a larger RAM footprint for more responsiveness. I'd put up with just about anything for more responsiveness.

The differences in responsiveness between LR and other apps like Capture One, ACDSee and others is astonishing.

I'm not a developer and can't imagine what to suggest here but if there are any unexplored avenues for optimizing LR's speed it would be greatly appreciated!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'd also like to add my vote to see an openCL support in future versions of LR 4.x. Currently I am also the owner of PhaseONE CaptureONE PRO 6 and have a GPU card with openCl support.

I can professionally vouch that the processing with the help of openCL enabled is faster. Screen redraws and image updates are noticeably faster and spiffy.

I am happy with the current stable release of the final 4.1 version. Glad it was usable unlike the previous versions.

[ChrBo]

Hello,

I enjoy using LR. But there is still one thing that lacks: Performance, especially in the Develop Module and Zooming...

So please speed up LR using:

- OpenCL/GPU acceleration. Capture One pro 6 is doing this. If they can do this, Adobe can also!

- AVX support: Nik Software is using this. Processes got 1,5 to 2,6 times faster than before. So again... if Nik Software is capable of implementing this, Adobe should be able as well!

Thanks, Adobe for hearing us.

Christoph

[Tron777]

Adobe did already speed up CS6 with GPU support!