I just feel Adobe need to speed up introducing Classic features into Cloud, so the apps can reach feature parity, at that point no one will miss Classic due to performance. But at it stands for now, as a Classic user, Cloud version is simply unusable. Even just doing the export test above I was struggling to find where things are.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
M3 Max Throttling during Lightroom Export
- Thread starter macphoto861
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes, interestingly I saw something not too long ago (can't remember where... might have been a notification in the Creative Cloud app), something to the effect of encouraging users to try out the new feature in the other Lightroom app that lets you browse/edit files locally, leaving those files in place where you want to store them on your drive... I got the distinct impression that this is aimed squarely at LRC users.
It's not a great solution though, whenever you make edits, it appears to write them into the DNG file, which would wreak havoc on my backups (every time an image is edited, the DNG would have to be be backed up again).
And there are a few more things I'd need... API support so that I can use my hardware control surface, and the ability to designate that only smart previews be uploaded to the cloud (I do a lot of editing on my iPad, and REALLY don't want to have to deal with having thousands of full resolution DNGs being moved around and stored on the iPad).
Last edited:
Also, I should note that the fast export performance of LRCC is a double-edged sword, specifically in terms of fan noise. One of the best things about moving from the i9 MBP to the M1 Max was the complete and utter silence (along with substantially faster exports). While I would like LRC to take at least a little more advantage of the M3 Max chip, the screaming fan noise (at least when in high power mode) of LRCC would be intolerable. On auto power mode, it wasn't terrible, but was noticeable. Wouldn't want to use low power mode, because that would slow the whole system down, not just Lightroom.
In a perfect world, what we'd have is a Lightroom Classic with export code that was capable of equalling LRCC in terms of speed, but also had a user-adjustable setting, such as a "maximize export speed" checkbox. That way, the user could prioritize between having the fastest export speed, or less intrusiveness.
In a perfect world, what we'd have is a Lightroom Classic with export code that was capable of equalling LRCC in terms of speed, but also had a user-adjustable setting, such as a "maximize export speed" checkbox. That way, the user could prioritize between having the fastest export speed, or less intrusiveness.
Was the RAM issue ever resolved? The original poster has 36 GB of RAM, and the poster who reported no issues has 128 GB. A7R V files are huge... I suspect we may be seeing something related to RAM/Swap management (LRC is a NOTORIOUS RAM hog, while LRCC is much better). It would be interesting if someone would chime in with a machine with an intermediate amount of RAM (either the full-power version with 48 or 64 GB or the binned version with 96, although I suspect that 96 will behave much like 128).
I'd especially love to see this, because I'm trying to decide between 64 and 128 GB when I order my M3 Max in the next couple of months, and I have one of the few cameras that produces even huger files than the A7R V (the Fujifilm GFX 100S). Is there any reason at all to go for 128 for still photography? I don't do video, but I DO do 102 MP medium format stills, sometimes doing crazy things like pano-merging several of those.
I'd especially love to see this, because I'm trying to decide between 64 and 128 GB when I order my M3 Max in the next couple of months, and I have one of the few cameras that produces even huger files than the A7R V (the Fujifilm GFX 100S). Is there any reason at all to go for 128 for still photography? I don't do video, but I DO do 102 MP medium format stills, sometimes doing crazy things like pano-merging several of those.
Certainly a possibility...
I'm not knowledgeable to fully interpret this information, does it tell you anything? I mean, obviously LRC is consuming more memory, but are these numbers in "performance-harming" range?
4GB of swap isn't all that. But 17GB of compression is alarming, as in, throwing more at the system then it will need to swap more. If these two tests are really doing the exact tasks then there is a serious lack of optimisation on LR Classic side in regards to memory usage. 62% pressure is still kind of fine, but the problem is how the Cloud version does this with just 1/3rd.
I also wasn't paying attention to RAM when I did my tests, too focused on power usage and clock. I may go back to test more. That said, all the memory demanding tasks are on Classic only anyway, the stitching and stacking. Not like there is a choice.
I also wasn't paying attention to RAM when I did my tests, too focused on power usage and clock. I may go back to test more. That said, all the memory demanding tasks are on Classic only anyway, the stitching and stacking. Not like there is a choice.
This is pretty odd, as it doesn't match any of the extensive testing I have done with Lightroom. I post pretty regularly on this on the Fred Miranda photography forums and recently did an update with the new 16" M3 Max I got. First, make sure that you have the exact same versions of MacOS and Lightroom on those two machines, because with Lightroom 13.x there was an update to the DeNoise that actually slowed it down (they changed the DNG its writing, reducing it in size by about 40-50%, but slowing down the process by doing so). If they are all the same, then I'd be curious about the memory in those two machines, because that is a memory-intensive process.
I think what you are seeing overall is a result of LRC having an older code base. It's being updated slowly but the Creative Cloud version is just newer overall and from the very early stages has been written for Apple silicon, as there were iPad versions of that app years ago.
On the topic of memory, LRC is and always has been a bit of a memory pig, especially for anything that utilizes the GPU--like DeNoise, and export. It's one reason I have specced out my MBP's with a ton of RAM. That said, I have found that in most use cases there's no real improvement over 64GB unless you are like me and love to have a ton of other apps running and your browser open with 20 tabs. With my M2 Max MBP I found 96GB to be fine, I could never push it. I got 128GB on this new M3 Max because I have hopes to be doing some significant 3D rendering with it now that there's hardware ray-tracing.
BTW, in my testing my 16" M3 Max 16C/40GPU/128GB was 29% faster at exporting Sony A1 raw files than my 16" M1 Max 10C/32GPU/64Gb and 21% faster than my 16" M2 Max 12C/38GPU/96GB. For Adobe AI DeNoise the M3 was 14% faster than the M2 and 24% faster than the M1.
I'm going to do repeat some of those and do similar CPU/GPU monitoring as you have done.
Go for more RAM. In my experience 64GB is the sweet spot for what you describe, but if you can afford more get it, especially if you like to multi-task on your machine or if you are planning on connecting high-resolution (5K or 6K) external displays to it, as they will need RAM to drive them.
I don't have the CC version installed, and honestly I don't want to install it. It's hobbled compared to the Classic version and I don't want all of my stuff in the cloud. I have almost 16TB of images in my libraries!
All of that to say I just tried Lightroom Classic today with a ProDisplay XDR attached and absolutely no problems with flickering no matter which display reference mode I use; I have a custom one I've created and I tried that and the 1600nits version and a third one; no issues at all on any of them.
Art's videos always have LRCC AI denoise tested. It does seem the Max chip generations don't get significant denoise time cut, but adding more RAM does, or you need a combination of both. It seems like there is a diminishing return after 32GB, until you throw double the GPU cores at it with an Ultra chip, where we don't even know how it would have performed with <64GB.
And to further on the RAM topic, if what the OP did was just exporting images in batch, there is no reason for memory to keep being compressed instead of being released. That is a clear case of Classic not being optimized or simply doing it wrong.
Yeah, I think that was the strangest part of all of this, as surely there should be at least somewhat of an improvement! Both machines were running the latest release of LrC, and the latest OS. The M1 Max was 32gb. I no longer have that machine, but I’ll run it again on the M3 Max tomorrow and observe the memory usage.
I have it installed, but I don’t regularly use it… just have it so I can occasionally check on it to see how it’s progressing, because I have no doubt Adobe’s plan is to eventually kill off Classic.
One step in that direction is the somewhat new feature that lets LRCC edit files locally without needing to do the cloud thing. But still, even with that, it’s pretty severely hobbled… I could do my work in that app if I absolutely had to, but it would be far from ideal, for a number of reasons.
A correction from what I posted earlier, apparently LRCC does now have red eye elimination.
Regardless, if Adobe really does want to eliminate having to maintain two separate apps, rather than the gradual trickle of new features in LRCC, where the mindset seems to be, “ok, Classic users, is THIS enough to lure you over?”, they should scrap LRC, scrap LRCC, and release one massively overhauled Lightroom that has complete feature parity with the current LRC, with the more modern code of LRCC. Everyone would be happy.
I used to think that but no longer. I think that *was* the original plan back in the early days when all of the tech hype was cloud this, cloud that, it will all be in cloud. Nope, that really doesn't work for a ton of things, and they learned that along the way. You hear virtually nothing about Photoshop in the cloud, but that was also once a goal.
They have been investing a ton of work in new features and performance improvements in Lightroom Classic in the last two years. I am convinced they finally realized that the money base in Lightroom were never users of the cloud version, and those users are also subscribers to the photo package that includes Photoshop.
My guess is that if they had their choice there wouldn't be two versions of the app, but now they are stuck. Classic will remain the "Pro" app with heavy lifting and more features, the Creative Cloud version will be for the lightweight users and as a draw to get those folks into the Adobe ecosystem. There are still a lot things that need to be updated in the code base of Lightroom but they seem to be progressively working their way through it and adding more and more advanced features. The apps they are competing with are doing the same--and BTW none of them are "cloud" apps either. That model just is a poor fit for applications that rely on using what often amounts to many terabytes of raw image files.
just researching this problem, and wondering if there is any more information. I’ve run a series of Lightroom Classic tests on numerous MacBook Pros as well as the 2013 and 2019 Mac Pros, and am surprised to find that exporting is excruciatingly slow with the new m3Max. Just to confirm my results I’ve rerun the test on my M2Max before selling it. Exporting 500 Sony A7r4 raw files without any adjustments in the develop module takes about 2:01 minutes on the M2 Max. Files are local to the internal SSD and are exported to the internal SSD. the same test on the M3max takes 4:21 minutes. If I apply a series of dust spot removals to the first file, as well as a couple of graduated filters and some global adjustments (same develop settings synced to all 500 files) , the m2max will export those in 6:44 minutes, the m3Max takes 12:31 seconds. This slowness seems exclusive to exporting. I have 5 sets of files that when panorama merged (these are 80mp phase one IQ 180 files), takes 3:43 on the M2 and 3:41 on the M3Max. I haven’t run the Puget Systems photoshop test, as that takes a while, will be interested to see what it shows. However, compressing a 30 minute screenflow video (1080p) for uploading to YouTube takes 9:43 on the M2Max and only 7:33 on the M3 max.
I see no core throttling on either machine, all 12 cores pretty much maxed out. Not sure about CPU speed throttling but not sure why that would happen, neither machine gets more than warm.
Both machines are 12 core, 64GB of ram. the m3 has 40 core GPU, the m2 has the 38 core GPU. both have a 4TB ssd, and both running Sonoma 14.1.2 and LRClassic 13.0.2. The M3 was setup using Migration utility so identical to the M2.
Last thing to test unless there is some word on the cause of this from somewhere is to restore the M3 to factory, install only LR classic, and run the tests to make sure there isn’t some odd thing going awry with some other background task.
I see no core throttling on either machine, all 12 cores pretty much maxed out. Not sure about CPU speed throttling but not sure why that would happen, neither machine gets more than warm.
Both machines are 12 core, 64GB of ram. the m3 has 40 core GPU, the m2 has the 38 core GPU. both have a 4TB ssd, and both running Sonoma 14.1.2 and LRClassic 13.0.2. The M3 was setup using Migration utility so identical to the M2.
Last thing to test unless there is some word on the cause of this from somewhere is to restore the M3 to factory, install only LR classic, and run the tests to make sure there isn’t some odd thing going awry with some other background task.
This should not be happening. My M3 Max is MUCH faster than my M2 Max at exporting. You have something wrong in your machine. Have you monitored GPU use during export? I have experienced glitches in the past with Lightroom where it was not using GPU acceleration and it required a removal and reinstall to correct the problem. In fact, I think that happened when I used the Migration Assistant. I have never used it since then and just do clean installs.
Monitor the GPU use in export--you should see it get pegged out during an export.
I just checked the benchmarking data I did. Exporting 1465 Sony A1 raw files to full-sized jpegs is 22% faster on my M3 Max vs. my M2 Max; both were maxed out machines. Meanwhile the M2 Max was only 8.8% faster than the M1 Max, both again maxed out.
As per your suggestion, I uninstalled LR Classic, and then reinstalled it. The differences in exporting were dramatic. Exporting the 500 files without modifications dropped from 4:21 to 1:14 (it was 2:01 on the M2) Once I applied the develop settings to all the files, exporting dropped to 5:56 down from 12:31 (it was 6:44 on the M2). Panorama merges were identical (and watching CPU/GPU usages, this seems this process is really inefficient as none of the cores are anywhere close to maxed out). This time is pretty consistent between all 3 Mx Max MBP, and the 12 core Intel Mac Pro takes 5:34 to do this.
I think the performance on exporting will depend quite a bit on the number of files and the amount of develop module adjustments to the files. the M3 Max does seem to have different thresholds for cooling. I started the export of the 500 modified files at the same time on both machines, watching GPU/CPU histories. The M3 was moving along, definitely faster than the M2, then about 150 files in the M3 started to slow, the fans sped up noticeably, and both the CPU and GPU dropped dramatically in use. the M2 was then moving along faster, and both were about at 50% at the same time, then the M3 began to ramp up again, and maintained that, finishing faster. Might do some more testing. Wondering If only exporting 250 files in this test would result in similar times.
Anyway, thanks for the tip. guessing that something went wrong when Migration utility moved LR over, and the resinstall seemed to fix it.
I think the performance on exporting will depend quite a bit on the number of files and the amount of develop module adjustments to the files. the M3 Max does seem to have different thresholds for cooling. I started the export of the 500 modified files at the same time on both machines, watching GPU/CPU histories. The M3 was moving along, definitely faster than the M2, then about 150 files in the M3 started to slow, the fans sped up noticeably, and both the CPU and GPU dropped dramatically in use. the M2 was then moving along faster, and both were about at 50% at the same time, then the M3 began to ramp up again, and maintained that, finishing faster. Might do some more testing. Wondering If only exporting 250 files in this test would result in similar times.
Anyway, thanks for the tip. guessing that something went wrong when Migration utility moved LR over, and the resinstall seemed to fix it.
Great! Glad I could help. When I had last dug into this when I had problems, it was a configuration file that turns off GPU acceleration and the only way to fix the problem is to reinstall. Well, there is another way that isn't always successful, but a clean reinstall is a simple fix.
As for the CPU use, it's very clear that there is still a ways to go in Lightroom classic to optimize performance. As others have shown, the new Lightroom CC doesn't have any issues with the CPU ramping down. The core code in Lightroom Classic is really quite old and many tasks have very limited or poor multi-core support (the panorama stitching is a great example of this). The last two major releases have been fixing a lot of these things while also adding the new "AI" features, so hopefully we'll see that continue.
This has no effect on Lightroom Classic. I and others have all tried this. It's definitely something the LR Classic code, not the OS throttling down.
was using High power mode. might test it using Low power mode, some tests might still beat M2 Max.
Has anyone tried the new version of Lightroom? Update 7.3 became available earlier today and adds the ability for AI Denoise to use the neural engine... I was hoping this would cut Denoise times significantly but from my first few tests, I'm not saying much (if any) improvement over using the GPU alone.
I'm getting around 18 seconds for a denoise of a RAW 61mpx shot from the Sony A7RV - prior to the update I was getting around 20 seconds per denoise. Interested to see how much power is being drawn now vs previously also
I'm getting around 18 seconds for a denoise of a RAW 61mpx shot from the Sony A7RV - prior to the update I was getting around 20 seconds per denoise. Interested to see how much power is being drawn now vs previously also
I'll do some testing this evening when I am home again. I suspect that the highest-end machines may see less benefit--the ones with a ton of GPU cores--given the limited number of ANE cores. The performance of the M2 Ultra with 76 GPU cores is already very similar to an Nvidia 4080 for DeNoise.
Yeah good point, I wonder if that explains why I didn't see much benefit using a fully specced out M3 Max, and whether there'd be a bigger benefit on say an M3.