Best Graphics Card For Lightroom 6

XEyedBear • Junior Member • Posts: 45

Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

Oct 24, 2019

I'm mindful that this forum area is supposed to be for discussion of software, but I hope you will be generous and allow this topic.

I'm searching for a better performing graphics card for use with LR 6.14 under Win 10. I currently have a rather old Nvidia GTX 645. I want to keep below about 85W TDP but I want good G2D performance and a card that is DX 12 or GL 3.5 at least compliant, so that I can utilise the minimal GPU acceleration capability in the Develop module of this older version of LR. I don't think I need more than 2 GB of graphics RAM. The rest of my hardware is current generation.

The problem I am having in choosing a suitable card is that there is almost no information on the G2D performance of graphics cards, but plenty of comparative information on G3D, which I believe is irrelevant when using LR 6 (correct me if I am wrong). Not only that but I read elsewhere that modern very high performing cards actually have quite poor performance on G2D, possibly worse than my GTX 645.

Any opinions?

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Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

GTX 1050 Ti. Same G2D, much better in every other aspect. If you want to spend more, then Quadro P2000 is an option.

Echoa • Regular Member • Posts: 132

Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

Best Price to performance is the RTX 2070 but the GTX1060 and RTX 2060 performing very well also. Those would be the 3 best options IMO

Edit: just saw 85w TDP, yeah you have the 1050/1050ti then

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OP XEyedBear • Junior Member • Posts: 45

Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

Robert Zanatta wrote:

GTX 1050 Ti. Same G2D, much better in every other aspect. If you want to spend more, then Quadro P2000 is an option.

Yeah, close to my requirements, except 1050TiG2D is about 90% of my old current card, while prices is about 3 times what I paid for the 645. The G2D of the P2000 the best I have been able to find; so it should be: it costs 9 times what I paid for the 645. It's essentially unaffordable for a hobbyist home user.

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DerKeyser • Contributing Member • Posts: 768

Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

XEyedBear wrote:

I'm mindful that this forum area is supposed to be for discussion of software, but I hope you will be generous and allow this topic.

I'm searching for a better performing graphics card for use with LR 6.14 under Win 10. I currently have a rather old Nvidia GTX 645. I want to keep below about 85W TDP but I want good G2D performance and a card that is DX 12 or GL 3.5 at least compliant, so that I can utilise the minimal GPU acceleration capability in the Develop module of this older version of LR. I don't think I need more than 2 GB of graphics RAM. The rest of my hardware is current generation.

The problem I am having in choosing a suitable card is that there is almost no information on the G2D performance of graphics cards, but plenty of comparative information on G3D, which I believe is irrelevant when using LR 6 (correct me if I am wrong). Not only that but I read elsewhere that modern very high performing cards actually have quite poor performance on G2D, possibly worse than my GTX 645.

Any opinions?

Don't bother. LR 6.14 does not use GPU hardware in a scalable way, so you'll see no benefits from upgrading. There's no offload that scales across more GPU compute cores, and it does not use GPU memory to accelerate workloads. So what you have will easily deliver what LR 6.14 actually uses.

Your money would be much much better spent upgrading to LR Classic that actually uses GPU hardware And multi CPU cores. Trust me - It is substantially faster than 6.14 although there are still things that could be improved.

If you're not into subscriptions then you should start looking elsewhere (On1, Luminar, DXO or what not). LR 6.14 only responds to faster single core clock as it barely scales across two CPU cores - even here the gains are very very miniscule. So if you refuse that change your software then get a 5Ghz Intel 9900 CPU - that's the only thing that will make your LR experience slightly faster.

OP XEyedBear • Junior Member • Posts: 45

Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

DerKeyser wrote:

XEyedBear wrote:

I'm mindful that this forum area is supposed to be for discussion of software, but I hope you will be generous and allow this topic.

I'm searching for a better performing graphics card for use with LR 6.14 under Win 10. I currently have a rather old Nvidia GTX 645. I want to keep below about 85W TDP but I want good G2D performance and a card that is DX 12 or GL 3.5 at least compliant, so that I can utilise the minimal GPU acceleration capability in the Develop module of this older version of LR. I don't think I need more than 2 GB of graphics RAM. The rest of my hardware is current generation.

The problem I am having in choosing a suitable card is that there is almost no information on the G2D performance of graphics cards, but plenty of comparative information on G3D, which I believe is irrelevant when using LR 6 (correct me if I am wrong). Not only that but I read elsewhere that modern very high performing cards actually have quite poor performance on G2D, possibly worse than my GTX 645.

Any opinions?

Don't bother. LR 6.14 does not use GPU hardware in a scalable way, so you'll see no benefits from upgrading. There's no offload that scales across more GPU compute cores, and it does not use GPU memory to accelerate workloads. So what you have will easily deliver what LR 6.14 actually uses.

Your money would be much much better spent upgrading to LR Classic that actually uses GPU hardware And multi CPU cores. Trust me - It is substantially faster than 6.14 although there are still things that could be improved.

If you're not into subscriptions then you should start looking elsewhere (On1, Luminar, DXO or what not). LR 6.14 only responds to faster single core clock as it barely scales across two CPU cores - even here the gains are very very miniscule. So if you refuse that change your software then get a 5Ghz Intel 9900 CPU - that's the only thing that will make your LR experience slightly faster.

Thank you for this - it confirms what I had vaguely concluded anyway. Those vague ideas led me to choose the components for the system I just recently built to run LR & PS: 4-core only Intel CPU, which meant an i3-8100 Coffee Lake as the best price performer with reasonable single thread performance.

I was originally of the opinion that my graphics card was going to be adequate. Having now found out how to get the G2D data for all the cards listed on the PassMark benchmark results site, I have now concluded that there is NO card which meets my requirements (including price/performance) any better than my 5 year old GTX 645. The only way I can improve G2D performance is to move to a faster single thread CPU - as you suggest.

Yeah, I understand about the improvements in LR CC, but, with respect, I'm not willing to pay multiple times for my copy of LR. I'll avoid further discussion on that because this is not the right place, and I can't talk about it without becoming intemperate.

I've looked at alternatives to LR; none are yet a complete replacement. DXO in particular is a non-starter for me because they don't support my camera's .RAF. OnOne has some fatal flaws (read Thomas Fitzgerald's review). Capture One Express for Fuji looks attractive, especially because of it's X-Trans demosaicing support. These alternatives may be able to exploit 6 or 8 core Intel CPus better than LR 6.14 and so, by default, give me better G2D performance as well as GPU acceleration. Of course all these alternatives imply paying for a sort of LR again!

In summary then, no change for present until I've made a decision on a replacement to LR - if any.

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Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

I upgraded my GPU and there was a noticeable improvement with some features of the develop module on LR 6. So a better GPU can make a difference.

DerKeyser • Contributing Member • Posts: 768

Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

Robert Zanatta wrote:

I upgraded my GPU and there was a noticeable improvement with some features of the develop module on LR 6. So a better GPU can make a difference.

Yes, LR 6 does use some GPU accelerated features in the develop module (Some of the tools - far from all). But please note that it is NOT GPU compute (OpenCL) that is being used, but just standard Graphics Acceleration (OpenGL). Essentially that means all the Lightroom image manipulation calculations is done on the CPU, and then we ask the GPU to use Hardware assisted features to draw those (IE: Ask the GPU to pick up the changes in memory and draw it). OpenCL would have the 600+ "GPU cores" of modern GPUs do both all the calculations as well as the drawing - from GPU memory.... This is what LR Classic does in many situations now - and trust me, that is noticable if you have a decent GPU (fx. GTX1060).

So yes, a difference can be felt - if fx. You upgrade from a Intel iGPU or one of the small Radeon/nVidia cards for enterprise desktops. But the OP has a GTX645 which is not fast by any measure, but it does feature a resonable GPU Clock which is what matters when only using OpenGL G2D acceleration. Say he bought a GTX1050ti - I'm sure there would be an okay difference (If only slightly) if he is running 4K. But I guarantee you at FullHD there is no Noticable difference - not a difference worth buying a new GPU for at any rate.

Re: Suitable graphics card for LightRoom 6

Yes, it was most noticeable at 4K as before the GPU upgrade some slider movement lagged a fair bit. Now the slider moment lag is not really noticeable.