LR 3.2 Develop module not fluent but CPU not fully taxed

Question

Hello,
on my AMD Phenom II X6 2.8GHz (Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit, 4GB RAM) I experience LR3.2(64Bit)'s Develop module not to be really fluent. Esp. manual lens correction is sluggish. I expected the CPU to be fully taxed but I only see all 6 cores at 55-70% load. I tried overclocking the CPU to 3.2GHz but it doesn't really help. The CPU load decreases to 45-60% but there is not so much of a performance difference. I don't see a difference when I switch off writing metadata to files either. I also tried to exclude JPG, CR2 and lrcat files from the virus scanner's plan. LR uses around 950MB of ram. The catalog is around 15000 files large and I work on Canon 15MP CR2 raws (around 20MB/file).
Any idea what I could do?
best regards,
Fabian

Answer 1

Samoreen wrote:
Hi,
bob frost wrote:
IME a lot of this slow response to sliders etc is due to graphics card and driver problems.
Sorry Bob but I fully disagree with this. Most people having these problems with LR3 have up-to-date drivers and powerful systems. Moreover, what if Photoshop CS5, DxO Optics Pro, Bibble 5, LightZone,... work normally without any performance issue on a given system and LightRoom drives you nuts because it sometimes becomes so slow on the very same system? How could one explain that on the same system where the same display drivers are installed, LR 2 works with acceptable performances while LR 3, which is supposed to enhance these performances, brings the system down to its knee under some  circumstances?
Finally, these performance problems are almost always appearing when using local adjustements on the Mac and on the PC. And this should be caused by a display driver that is not up-to-date?
I regret that Adobe have been totally quiet about these problems since they appeared and especially since the release of LR 3.2. It's obviously a bug (or a series of bugs) and they could at least advertise that they are working on a fix.
You can have the most up-to-date graphics drivers and the most powerful systems, but still suffer from bugs in the graphics drivers. Just have a look at the release notes for the latest nVidia graphics http://http://uk.download.nvidia.com/Windows/260.89/260.89_Win7_WinVista_Desktop_Release_N otes.pdf
This very lengthy document lists all the problems that have been solved and those that are still unsolved, and you will see that the driver has problems with some programs (games mainly) and not others, runs faster with some games and not others, has problems with some graphics cards and not others, etc. It is an absolute minefield of bugs/problems.
I'm not saying that Adobe can't get round some of these problems themselves, as they have done in the past, and they have co-operated with nVidia in the past to solve some of the problems. They are probably still doing so.
Local adjustments have always been the achilles heel of LR; when you read how they are done, it is not surprising that anyone expecting to do loads of local adjustments runs into problems eventually. Personally, if an image needs a lot of local adjustment, I take it into Photoshop, which is better able to do this sort of work because of the fundamental difference in the way the program works. Horses for courses!
If you have a nVidia card, and go to the nVidia Control Panel, under 3D settings you will see a long list of variables that can be altered, and the panel has preselected sets for different programs and games. A long time ago, people showed that some of these settings had a big effect on LightRoom performance.
I'm sure Adobe is working on all the problems that they know about, and that the next version of LR will have fixes for some of the problems. But they won't cure all of them any more than nVidia, which still has loads of problems in driver version 260! LR is only in version 3 (Photoshop is in version 11).
Bob Frost