Video Speed and Lightroom
Sometimes it's Lightroom that's slow, but most of the times, you shouldn't blame Lightroom, it's the computer. How your computer is setup will influence most of the performance of Lightroom? One of the most important factor is, surprise, surprise the video card's configuration.
Photos, images, the video card, how shocked should you be that they are related. There are 2 major video card manufacturers:
- ATI
- NVidia
If they don't make your video card, they either sold the video chips or sold the license to manufacture the video chips. In laptops, the majority of the video cards are from ATI, on desktops the majority of the video cards are from Nvidia. I have found that Lightroom is much more "sensitive" to the configuration of the NVidia video card.
Almost all NVidia video cards come with a configuration utility, if not, you can download from their website NVidia.com. Here are the settings that have made a difference for me:
Performance and Quality Settings > Active Profile > Global Driver Settings > Advanced Settings
I have set the following:
| Image Settings | High Performance |
|---|---|
| Force Mipmaps | None |
| Trilinear Optimization | Off |
| Anisotropic Mip Filter Optimization | On |
| Anisotropic Sample Optimization | On |
| Triple Buffer | Off |
- The setting of "Anisotropic Mip Filter Optimization" being on will result in a LOWER image quality but a significant speed improvement.
- The setting of "Anisotropic Sample Optimization" being on will result in a LOWER image quality but a significant speed improvement.
It's your choice, I made mine. I personally haven't noticed a lowering of the image quality, but it could be my eyes, my monitor, the lighting in the room... Right now, I want speed.