This means that some operations may actually take longer when using the GPU, such as the time to load the full-resolution image, and the time to switch from one image to another. In the case of high-res images and big screens, that can take a LOT of time.

For example, it takes time to get data from the main processor (CPU) over to the GPU. Second, GPUs are marvelous at high-speed computation, but there's some overhead.

The area that I started with was interactive image editing in Develop, and even then, I didn't manage to speed up everything yet (more on this later). Given our limited time, we needed to pick and choose specific areas of Lightroom to optimize. So the first tradeoff is that, for this particular version of Lightroom, we weren't able to take advantage of the GPU to speed up everything. Especially for software like Lightroom, which offers a rich feature set developed over many years and release versions. But they're complex and involve some tradeoffs, which I'd like to take a moment to explain.įirst, rewriting software to take full advantage of GPUs is a lot of work and takes time. Well, GPUs can be enormously helpful in speeding up many tasks. The same sliders in Lightroom 6.0 now run smoothly at 60 FPS. The bigger the screen, the bigger the win.įor example, on my test system with a 4K display, adjusting the White Balance and Exposure sliders in Lightroom 5.7 (without GPU support) is about 5 frames/second - manageable, but choppy and hard to control.

Using the GPU can provide a significant speedup (10x or more) on high-res displays.

This means on a 4K display we need to render and display 4 times as many pixels as on a standard HD display. To give you some numbers: a standard HD screen is 2 megapixels (MP), a MacBook Retina Pro 15' is 5 MP, a 4K display is 8 MP, and a 5K display is a whopping 15 MP. A big reason that we started here is the recent development and increased availability of high-res displays, such as 4K and 5K monitors. Lr can now use graphics processors (GPUs) to accelerate interactive image editing in Develop. I wanted to share some additional information regarding GPU support in Lr CC.

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