Speeding up Lightroom, not so Cheap
Just before Xmas, I started to have problems with my computer (again.) This time, it was the video card. Either the video card was on “the fritz”, or the problem was with the driver. I had an nVidia 310GT video card that came with the computer. So I bought an Asus nVidia 550GT video card for the grand total of $129 Canadian.
This new video card with the current video driver, from nVidia's website, supports hardware acceleration. This means that any of the screen operations are not done by the CPU but by the video card. My CPU is an Intel Core i7 with 4 cores and hyper-threading, meaning that it looks like 8 CPUs.
My video card has: 192 cores! Not 4, not 8 but 192 cores. Many of the Lightroom video operations are much faster, including generating the previews. I have seen a speed improvement between of 33% to 50% in generating/displaying the previews. I haven't figured out why the variations in the speed improvements, but I suspect that it has to do we the disk I/O.
Actually the big speed improvements are:
- Browsing the web, the rendering of the web pages are so much faster
- Photoshop, the camera raw and many of the blending operations are “super-fast”
- This does not apply to most laptops. Most laptops have their video card built-in the motherboard and cannot be changed.
- This doesn't apply to most Mac. The video card is built-in and cannot be changed.
- Most new hi-speed/high end video cards are full height with a huge cooling system and take the space of 2 slots.
- According to many, Lightroom doesn't use the GPU directly, but somehow I've seen enough of a speed improvement to notice it during the generating/browsing the 1:1 preview. Maybe it's a Windows function, it could be investigated but…
A more expensive card (in the $250 range) like the nVidia 570 has 480 cores. An nVidia 590 has 2 GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) with 512 cores per GPU for around $750.
- By the way, the same applies to ATI video cards.