P: NVIDIA support with importing images

[Darek375361264t2c]

Hello,

I am a user of adobe products for years now. But still I have not seen any improvement in case of the perfomance within photoshop and lightroom in the context of NVIDIA graphic accelerators usage. Is there any plan to introduce support of RTX video cards to speed the importing process and operating thumnabils and generally postprocessing within the lightroom enviroment? There are many products that are using to process images the video cards support with great results. Topaz Labs is a great example here. That shows it is possible.

Cant wait to see finally proper usage of our computer equipment properly. We, customers are forced to upgrade systems, increase RAM amount, but the perfomance is dropping and dropping down instead of being increased by the devices that are now commonly accessible.

Best regards,

Darek Jaszewski, photoportraitist

[Jao vdL]

What do you want to speed up? Importing is super fast if you simply use embedded previews. Generating previews (which really is not necessary in general if you just use embedded) takes time since it has to render every single image so best to simply avoid. Basically everything in processing images is accelerated on the GPU and can't be made much faster. All of the AI stuff is done on the GPU. Even on moderately old machines it is all very fast in my experience. 

Make sure in preferences->Performance it says that "your system automatically supports full acceleration"

There are some people that experience extreme slowness on very beefy machines. It seems to be quite random to whom that happens. Main causes are out of date GPU drivers or use of the gaming driver instead of the studio driver for Nvidia GPUs. Another very common reason for extreme slowness is overactive antivirus software on windows machines. 

>but the perfomance is dropping and dropping down instead of being increased by the devices that are now commonly accessible

The processing we are doing nowadays is far more complex and image sizes are far greater nowadays than they were even a few years ago. Truth is that the demands we ask for have easily kept up with the hardware we can access now.

[Darek375361264t2c]

Please, do not treat me like I was a random newbie and green computer user. I am working on the computers for last 30 years and am very much following the progress of the digital world. I know how to set proper options and if I say the perfomance is dropping down instead of being improved it means exactly what I want to write/say.

I also quite precisely wrote what I want to be sped up. I am working on same 20+ MP sensors as I was 10 years ago.

I am not running complex antivirus software and am controlling the processes run on my computer.

I am also working on SSD drives. The process of creating previews - which is set on my computer either, is one of the processes that is ongoing during the importing process.

Yes, I can simplify importing process to make it easier and lighter for my PC. But also, I can use the Photo Mechanic, right ?

My post here is made not to rise the discussion between the Adobe fans. It is made here to finally show my disappointment that is rising for years now.

[D Fosse]

You're making incorrect assumptions. This isn't about Nvidia GPU support. I don't doubt that you're having problems, but that's not the reason.

I work with 60 MP raw files and everything is snappy. I use two machines, one with an RTX 3060 and one with an RTX 4060 Ti.

Yes, I've noticed that some users have performance issues, and it seems somewhat random. It happens on Windows and Mac, with Nvidia and AMD. I can't explain it, aside from the usual suspects. But what I can say, is that you need to look somewhere else than Lightroom's integration with Nvidia GPUs.

[Jao vdL]

Exactly as @D Fosse says. The integration of GPU in everything is extensive in Lightroom. The problem with the slowness some users experience is not caused by lack of GPU integrated code. My Lightroom is very speedy and essentially instantaneous with everything on a few years old machine that is nothing special nowadays. I read these threads from people that experience slowness and try to help and very very often it is just an outdated GPU driver or antivirus software  and fixing that solves it so it would be bad to not even mention that. Further than that we can only work with the info we have. I also gave you a method that makes Lightroom almost as fast as photomechanic by using the jpeg previews embedded in every raw file just like photomechanic does. This saves an enormous amount of processing of images that you will never use anyway. Preview generation is really just like exporting the images (it's basically the same thing). It just takes time and you should think if you actually need it in your workflow. Especially if you shoot 1000 images in a shoot using embedded previews is an enormous timesaver. It really only generates a preview for an image then if you actually touch the image in develop. Others are just let alone.

[KR Seals]

@Darek375361264t2c Hi Darek, yes, you can use Photo Mechanic to simplify and speed up the Lightroom Classic culling process. Since you mentioned it, I'm sure you know how much time one can save by culling before LrC importing hundreds or thousands of images. The images I cull in Photo Mechanic are images that don't have to be imported or previews created in LrC. That's big time saver for me and one of the keys to making LrC much nicer and faster to work with.