Lightroom: Limits of Lightroom CC GPU acceleration

[Doug Nelson]

I was floored when I ran across this information from Adobe today:

The Develop module is the only module that currently leverages graphics processor (GPU) acceleration. Comands and processes outside the Develop module are not currently (GPU) graphics processor accellerated. For example, the commands for merging multiple images to create HDR files or panoramas do not leverage the graphics processor (GPU).

Here's the full text.

I was so hoping that merging and even importing was accelerated. You know, the things where you actually see a progress bar.

[klev]

re: Limits of Lightroom CC GPU acceleration

Even if you assume completely opaque APIs (not likely) for all of the graphics drivers, it might be difficult to set up parts of the necessary operations in a way that is parallel and actually alleviates some bottleneck. Otherwise you don't really gain anything. In this case you have to deal with a lot of things being read from the disk. We don't know what portion of their users have raid acceleration or the latest SSDs, but without this the disk is a much bigger bottleneck when dealing with operations that must access multiple files.

[Doug Nelson]

re: Limits of Lightroom CC GPU acceleration

This guy claims GPU acceleration can actually provide a slight performance drop in the non-accelerated areas. Very slight, but he ran some tests, and it is an interesting development

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qzw2ClGWJ8

[klev]

re: Limits of Lightroom CC GPU acceleration

This guy claims GPU acceleration can actually provide a slight performance drop in the non-accelerated areas. Very slight, but he ran some tests, and it is an interesting development

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qzw2ClGWJ8

I'm only talking about this stuff from a very high level perspective. There are a lot of things that go on under the hood, and there are a few calls involved that are very expensive.

[Doug Nelson]

re: Limits of Lightroom CC GPU acceleration

I just watched a pretty good video where the author tortured Lightroom CC in ways you'd never use it in reality, all in the name of discovering what is and what isn't actually accelerated. He walked through every tool and command with a GPU meter onscreen, showing what is and what isn't accelerated. He made a couple of excellent points:

1) If you don't have a high-end card, do noise reduction and lens correction last, as those have to be constantly updating as you make other corrections
2) All the data about what is and what isn't accelerated could change drastically with just the next dot release (or not).