Any performance improvement in Lightroom with 16” i9 MBP vs mid 2017 i7 MBP”

[ejg1890]

This is out there to the creatives; photographers, video, illustrators, etc. I currently use a mid 2017 MBP. While I am not a professional photographer I am an avid hobbiest. My primary applications are Lightroom, Photoshop, Luminar, and FCXP. I am curious if people that used a mid 2017 MBP entry level 15” sees an improvement with a standard 16” i9 MBP?

Let me know.

Thanks

[D Fosse]

For Lightroom, most likely not. It's hit or miss. Lightroom performance seems to depend on a series of cryptic factors that no one has been able to figure out - but machine specs isn't one of them. Often a low spec machine can outperform one nominally much more powerful.

Aside from that, parametric editing will always give you these small delays. That's because for every little thing you do, no matter how minor, the whole processing pipeline runs from scratch, every single step all over again. It's not cumulative or incremental as in pixel editing.

That said, general Lightroom speed and reliability seems to have improved lately. I had my dose of performance problems some years ago, but I haven't had any complaints for several years now. It's snappy enough that I don't think about it anymore, even in high voloume high speed work. But Photoshop will always be faster.

Speaking of Photoshop, a potentially big difference is your system drive - specifically SATA versus NVMe SSDs. The latter is a huge speed improvement in Photoshop, where the real bottleneck has always been the scratch disk. There's no such thing as enough RAM, no matter how much you have. It always comes down to the scratch disk. The CPU is less critical in Photoshop. That's not what you're waiting for.