No one said it had anything to do with Apple. Also, mostly progress by Intel, because Adobe's "progress" on performance of their apps has been negligible at best.
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MP 7,1 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 Lightroom and Photoshop configuration and Test [UPDATE: Radeon VII, 2013 MAC PRO TEST]
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No one said it had anything to do with Apple. Also, mostly progress by Intel, because Adobe's "progress" on performance of their apps has been negligible at best.
I think that will definitely help. I'll do some benchmarks with the cache/catalogs on the primary drives and then with them moved to the NVMe RAID array as well.
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I didn’t see any performance gained from running my catalog off of my NVMe raid 0 that was getting 6,000mb/s
I had a 12 core 2tb 580X with the NVMe raid and the Pegasus i4 but graphics struggled it seemed on two 4K 32” displays so I wanted to change the graphics card but the only way to do it was to return and order again.
I am waiting on a 12 core 8tb ProVegaII and afterburner card. Memory I’ll upgrade myself.
Returned the NVMe raid setup and went bigger internal since I didn’t see a huge speed gain and I went with an afterburner card this time because I do some video and mostly pro res raw.
It really does seem as if the bottle neck at this point is Adobe. I really hope they make some serious tweaks to improve perform to take advantage of the hardware. I will be testing out capture one as I’ve had multiple people say its much much faster.
I really can not wait for Monday to get my machine and to see how it behaves with the 5K screens on the Vega II.
AD - Can you direct me to a publication(s) which suggest a card other than the 580X for the XDR ProDisplay? This is the first I've heard of this. It's possible a publication documented this and I (as well as others I imagine) would be interested in the technical details behind your suggestion.
Regards
I am using Lightroom 6 and 4K monitor.
My cMP 5.1 also has Highpoint SSD7102 installed.
Booting with NVMe SSD hardware Raid０ does not make Lightroom run faster, it feels similar to sata ssd.
It seems that the larger the 'Lightroom Catalog.lrcat' file, the slower the operation speed.
Now my 'Lightroom Catalog.lrcat' is about 14GB and 'Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata' is about 160GB.
Using a 4K or higher resolution monitor will make the catalog file grow faster.
The recommended thing to do is to store the Lightroom Catalog file on a faster SSD, maybe your Highpoint SSD7101a, but the improvement should not be much.
Using smaller catalog files improves speed and is cheaper.
I think using the fastest single-core CPU, and more cores for export, is the way to speed up Lightroom the most.
What CPU should Mac Pro 7.1 use to help Lightroom speed up the most?
I don't think you'll find anything published on this. Lightroom is well known for it's struggles with high-resolution displays. If you start poking around online in the Adobe forums and photography forums like FredMiranda you'll find a lot of posts about it. It's been a problem for years now, and while the latest releases this past year included some GPU acceleration that can help, experience has indicated that the amount of memory and power of the GPU are directly related to how laggy the UI can be on higher-resolution screens (and processor power, too). Based on that history, my assumption is that going even higher in resolution would make it worse--and there are anecdotal reports to the same effect from those who have used the Dell 8K displays.
Lightroom 6 is pretty old; they're on version 9 now. Lightroom is definitely faster with a smaller catalog, but that can be pretty limiting to chop up your photos into multiple catalogs. There's also functions that are completely unrelated to catalog size that are slow--for example, the clone/heal brush and the adjustment brushes. Part of it is the way the whole application is architected such that you can go back to the original unedited photo, with retained history, and part of it just appears to be a lack of interest in speeding up performance on Adobe's part. For many functions it uses only one a few cores, even as processors have moved to having many cores--and that's clearly the direction of future processor improvements as well.
Because it is dependent heavily on CPU, having as fast a CPU as possible does help, but now with the enhanced GPU support in version 9.x a fast GPU with plenty of memory also helps. Some testing I've seen online suggests that LR seems to rarely use more than 6 CPU cores, except for certain tasks like exports, and Adobe's own hardware recommendations seem to imply the same. That said, for exports, more cores are definitely used. Other tasks like raw decoding are tied to the speed of a single core, as it's a pretty linear task that isn't able to be parallelized with most raw formats (Sony's format is an apparent exception, but I don't know if Adobe leverages that or not).
I ended up choosing the 16-core processor in my Mac Pro as a compromise. The 12-core would be another good choice. Both support the higher 2933Mhz memory speed, and have plenty of speed. While the base is 0.1 Ghz higher on the 12-core, I have found that the functions that tax the CPU spike it up to the 4.4 Ghz maximum anyway, so that base speed is pretty much irrelevant. I often have multiple apps open and running, so for me the 16-core option was better as I could be assured of resources for the other apps.
If I wanted to buy a machine 100% purely for Lightroom use, right now Apple doesn't have one, at least until they update the iMac line. The i9 and i7 Core-X processors perform extremely well with Lightroom, and have very high clock speeds.
Let's put this to the forum members: Anyone with a new Mac Pro, 580X and XDR ProDisplay, please chime in.
I am currently using the 2013 MP with two AMD FirePro D500 cards. One of my LR preview catalogs is 360GB and I do run into slow photo loading from time to time.
Thank you all in advanced.
I am currently using the 2013 MP with two AMD FirePro D500 cards. One of my LR preview catalogs is 360GB and I do run into slow photo loading from time to time.
Thank you all in advanced.
I found that Lightroom is using a lot of GPU memory, after switching between images in the develop module can fill up VRAM very quickly, is this means 8gb videoRAM is not good enough for LR(best performance) now? btw Im using the newest LR with GPU accelate ON. and a 2560X1600Monitor
Adobe has really been lagging on this issue. You can go down to lower resolution display and it is better, but why? The problem for me (and I'm sure many others share this) is that I've heavily leveraged the DAM features of LR to manage my photo archives--literally terabytes of photos. As a consequence, simply switching to another app is not an easy proposition. I've tried Capture One and frankly the UI just doesn't work at all for me, and the management of my library is too crucial to give up. In addition, I use a number of other apps with LR plugins, and that saves me tons of time in my workflow. Sigh.
What...............! even with vegaII？
I suggest you back to 2560x1440 thunderbolt display 27 in from apple or DELL 2560x1600(what Im using, the 16:10 is photo-friendly)
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yea, a lot of presets in my LR, hard to switch Capture One, When you have a chance Can you please use the Intel Power Gadget and take a screenshot when exporting Raws? thanks a lot
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yea, well switching back to a Low Res Display would surely speed up everything, including premiere's UI massively. But then again - WHY DID I JUST SPEND 10k $ for a new machine? WTF Adobe? The Apple Photos app BLASTS threw tens of thousands of photos like butter, and lightroom stutters like a broken app. Even on the iPad they managed to make Lightroom buttery smooth, but on the mac... oh my.
By the way the Memory on my Vega II is 92% full right now.
I think I might really need a second one, one for each display...
What are you using to monitor the memory use in the Vega II?
But yeah...I knew that LR wouldn't get a ton better. I bought my Mac Pro to make everything else faster, and hoped that LR would be better. UI wise it's still sluggish, but my exports, etc. are much, much faster now. Anywhere from 2-3.5x faster than on my loaded 16" MacBook Pro. The annoying thing is the UI is in your face all of the time so the lag can be terribly annoying.
I use iStat Menus. It's crazy, right now the VRAM is at 95%, while I'm just using Safari. It's like it's filling up over time with whatever I open, and now it's just full... 32 gigs!!
Sure, exports and performance is much faster, I rendered a Premiere project in 2 minutes that used to take like 6-8 mintues before on my 8 core trashcan. So the performance is massive!!
But when the UI is sluggish, it still feels like you're on a years old machine, absolutely unacceptable.
I need to start looking for a serious Lightroom alternative.. or well, I'm hoping that they'll match the featureset of Lightroom classic eventually with the new Lightroom, as it runs more smoothly.
I'm wondering if a second Vega II would help if one display is attached to each GPU.. but probably it won't because the software is just so poorly written.
Not good news for Adobe users that such a powerful new Machine can feel sluggish. You can walk away and make a cup of tea while exporting but sitting in front of your new Mac Pro waiting for sluggish UI is unacceptable with all that potential power at your fingertips.
Personally never liked LR with all that pointless module switching and I only ever use it for a few specific tasks as I get it free on the photography plan. Its a shame the new LR CC is only cloud based as its just not an option for professional use with the volume of image data shot in a week.
I imagine the amount of profits Adobe are making they don’t see the incentive to fix stuff in their software.
Personally never liked LR with all that pointless module switching and I only ever use it for a few specific tasks as I get it free on the photography plan. Its a shame the new LR CC is only cloud based as its just not an option for professional use with the volume of image data shot in a week.
I imagine the amount of profits Adobe are making they don’t see the incentive to fix stuff in their software.
That is disappointing to hear that such a powerful graphics card working with Lightroom gets these results. I wonder if Adobe will continue working on their GPU acceleration to help improve the sluggish UI, especially on the new 6k monitor. That was one of my hopes was getting a Mac Pro to use withe XDR montior with lightroom for improved speed and visuals over my 2014 27" iMac.
It is slightly better than on the old Mac Pro, but definitely still sluggish. I’m gonna make a video during the next days for you.
i didn’t really expect it to become buttery smooth, as I remember very well the outcry of iMac Pro users in another forum, who also had god awful UI performance on their top end machines. It must be something in The adobe code that hinders their UIs to render better on retina displays.
If you poke around the Adobe forums and elsewhere, it's not limited to Apple's retina displays, either. People using PC's with 5K and great displays also have the same issue.
All of Adobe's CC apps are old, bloated and full of old legacy code and in need of a massive refresh. After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop are all horrible in their performance no matter what hardware you run them on. They should put the entire CC suite on feature freeze and do a Snow Leopard and optimise optimise optimise. But they won't because how could marketing justify the yearly sub cost if nothing new was added for those NAB headlines?
If you try Photoshop next to Affinity Photo it feels like something from the distant past competing with an app beamed in from the future. The desktop and iPad versions of Affinity totally smoke Adobe's apps and are not far off each other feature wise. In the case of the iPad versions Affinity is years ahead.
Hopefully Affinity have a version of Lightroom in the works.
If you try Photoshop next to Affinity Photo it feels like something from the distant past competing with an app beamed in from the future. The desktop and iPad versions of Affinity totally smoke Adobe's apps and are not far off each other feature wise. In the case of the iPad versions Affinity is years ahead.
Hopefully Affinity have a version of Lightroom in the works.
It's apparently much less of an issue at 4k and lower. I need to do some testing at my office with my new Mac Pro 7,1--I have the 6K ProDisplay XDR, the 5K LG and a 4K display. Later this week when I'm back after the holiday break I'll do some comparisons and report back.
Since whenever multi-core CPUs have been available, countless people have slammed Adobe for not coding Photoshop to use all those cores all the time.
Well I'll let the whiners in on a secret: there's lots and lots of computational tasks that can NEVER be solved by parallel processing. It's impossible. I won't get into the nitty gritty of of it here (because granted, I don't claim to fully understand it) but in a nut shell, many image editing tasks require a serial approach to get the desired effect accomplished. Calculations have to be done sequentially to reach the final result. That means nothing more (like another core) can work on the problem until the first one finishes. But when the first CPU is done, there's no point in delegating the rest of the problem to another core when the first one is ready to go. So all the other cores just sit around doing nothing.
Granted, some things,like rendering certain effects and exporting can use gobs of cores to good advantage, a lot of the functions inside of Photoshop will never be able to... because it's not possible.
Well I'll let the whiners in on a secret: there's lots and lots of computational tasks that can NEVER be solved by parallel processing. It's impossible. I won't get into the nitty gritty of of it here (because granted, I don't claim to fully understand it) but in a nut shell, many image editing tasks require a serial approach to get the desired effect accomplished. Calculations have to be done sequentially to reach the final result. That means nothing more (like another core) can work on the problem until the first one finishes. But when the first CPU is done, there's no point in delegating the rest of the problem to another core when the first one is ready to go. So all the other cores just sit around doing nothing.
Granted, some things,like rendering certain effects and exporting can use gobs of cores to good advantage, a lot of the functions inside of Photoshop will never be able to... because it's not possible.