A while ago, Adobe finally added Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Acceleration to its Lightroom post-processing software. It was exciting news, as many photographers could not wait to take advantage of their fast GPU cards in order to speed up Lightroom, which was getting painfully slower with each new release. Unfortunately, GPU acceleration turned out to be a painful feature for many Lightroom users overtime, because they either saw no benefit at all, or saw very few improvements of it in their post-processing work. In this article, we will explore GPU acceleration in more detail and explain what it is used for and when it is of no use.
First, let’s take a look at the system requirements.
System Requirements and Recommended GPUs
In order to be able to run GPU acceleration, Adobe requires 64-bit versions of Windows or MacOS, along with a video card that can support either OpenGL 3.3 or later, or DirectX 12 (Windows) / Metal (MacOS). There is no support for SLI (two or more video cards) or multiple monitors (only the main / primary screen is accelerated). Adobe recommends a minimum of 1 GB of Video RAM (VRAM), but 2 GB of VRAM or more are recommended for 4K+ monitors. To get the best GPU acceleration performance, you should be running the latest version of Lightroom CC.
As highlighted on this page, Adobe recommends video cards from three different vendors: AMD, NVIDIA and Intel, as long as those cards were made after 2014 and the latest drivers are installed. Adobe specifically lists AMD Radeon R9-series and later cards, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760+ and GTX 900+ cards and Intel HD or Intel Iris Pro cards as “suggested” graphics cards for GPU acceleration.
However, it is important to point out that even if a video card falls into the “suggested” category, it does not mean that it will make Lightroom faster with GPU acceleration enabled. In fact, as many Lightroom users have found out, enabling GPU acceleration can often lead to inferior performance and all kinds of software glitches when a video card is not powerful enough. For example, despite Adobe’s recommendation for use of integrated Intel GPUs, I personally have not seen a single instance where enabling GPU acceleration on those cards helped. The same holds true for most older dedicated video cards found on laptops – they are typically not powerful enough for GPU acceleration.
To take advantage of GPU acceleration, below is the list of video cards I can recommend:
- AMD Radeon Pro 555+ (for mobile)
- AMD Radeon RX 480+, 550+, Vega 56+ (for desktops)
- NVIDIA GTX 960+, 1060+, QUADRO P4000+ (for mobile and desktops)
You will note that I am not listing any older cards from AMD and NVIDIA. That’s because most older cards are simply inadequate for proper GPU acceleration. Unless you have a high-end card from a few years back with plenty of VRAM and CUDA Cores / Stream Processors, you should not consider it for GPU acceleration in Lightroom. Also, I did not list any of the integrated GPUs from Intel, for the same reasons as specified above – they are too slow / inadequate for smooth Lightroom performance with GPU acceleration enabled.
Even if your card is in the recommended list, I would run Lightroom with GPU acceleration enabled, then see how it behaves with GPU acceleration disabled. I have had cases where GPU acceleration introduced many software glitches, where the screen would turn dark and using gradient or spot healing tools were painfully slow (see below for more details). Unfortunately, GPU acceleration in Lightroom is not fully reliable and can vary in performance between different releases, which is why it is best to test it out to see if it offers any benefits in your environment.
NVIDIA Drivers
If you have an NVIDIA GeForce video card, make sure that you are running the latest version of those drivers, which can be obtained from here. However, if you have a Quadro-series video card, it is best that you use the ODE (Optimal Driver for Enterprise) version of the driver. If you don’t specifically install the ODE driver, your computer will default to GeForce driver, which is designed for gaming purposes only. To get the best performance out of Lightroom, make sure to install the latest version of the most appropriate driver.
GPU Acceleration: 2K vs 4K+ Environments
Speaking of the environment, GPU acceleration is mostly beneficial in high-resolution environments where the monitor has more than the typical 2K resolution. So if you have an older or a high-end 2K monitor with 1920 x 1080 or similar resolution, it might be a good idea to turn GPU acceleration off. However, if you have a 4K+ monitor, or one of those large “retina” screens from Apple, GPU acceleration can be more helpful in accelerating Lightroom.
Monitor Connection: HDMI vs DP / Mini DP / Thunderbolt
For best performance, I would recommend to connect your monitor to your machine via either DisplayPort (DP), Mini DP or Thunderbolt. If you use HDMI cable, you might notice sluggish performance and if that’s the case, try to disable Audio output via HDMI in your settings to see if it makes a difference. I have seen cases where HDMI output made Lightroom practically unusable and switching to DP or disabling HDMI audio seemed to take care of the issues instantly.
What Is and Isn’t GPU-Accelerated in Lightroom
GPU acceleration in Lightroom is only available within the Develop module, so no other modules, including the Library module, will be accelerated. On top of that, not all the tools within the Develop module benefit from GPU acceleration either. So if you are wondering what specific tools are accelerated, below is the full list:
Panels:
- Basic
- Tone Curve
- HSL / Color / B&W
- Split Toning
- Detail
- Lens Corrections
- Transform
- Effects
- Camera Calibration
Tools:
- Crop & Straighten
- Graduated Filter
- Radial Filter
Actions:
- Panning and Zooming
And here is the list of specific tools and actions that are NOT GPU-accelerated:
- Spot Removal
- Red Eye Correction
- Adjustment Brush
- Using Brushes with Gradient and Radial Filters
- Loading RAW Images
- Generating JPEG Previews
- HDR Preview / Generation
- Panorama Preview / Generation
- Facial Recognition
Please note that the above list is compiled based on Lightroom CC 7.1. Prior versions of Lightroom did not have panels such as the Detail panel GPU-accelerated.
How to Enable GPU Acceleration
Enabling GPU acceleration is very easy. Just navigate to Lightroom Preferences (Edit -> Preferences), click the “Performance” tab, put a checkmark next to “Use Graphics Processor”, then click “OK”:
You should be able to see information about your graphics card right below and if you want to find out more information about your computer, you can click on the “System Info” button on the right side of the window.
GPU Acceleration Issues
As I have pointed out earlier, GPU acceleration can introduce problems in Lightroom. Below is the full list of issues I have come across:
- Extremely sluggish brush performance
- Image previews disappearing and showing as black or some other color
- Black image when zooming in or panning the image
- Slow performance when jumping between images
- Overall reduced Lightroom performance
If you notice any of the above issues, try disabling GPU acceleration and see if it improves Lightroom performance and its stability. Since GPU acceleration is a hit and miss for a lot of Lightroom users out there, you should experiment and see whether it brings you any performance improvements or not.
Hi Nasim…I have Quadro 600 and is considered entry level in Quadro series but never made it into your list. I feel like Quadro P4000+ is way too expensive for experimental benefit of GPU acceleration. Don’t you think so? Would the addition of M.2 stick or SSD HDD instead be a better option to speed up Lightroom? And what graphic card – AMD/NVIDIA/INTEL – will give me 10bit colour output to my 10bit capable monitor? Thanks.
Don, I used to have the Quadro 600 and I ended up moving up to the P4000 because it was way too slow. While you do get 10 bit output with this card, I would not recommend it at all for GPU acceleration – your Lightroom will only suffer as a result. And yes, changing to faster storage or a faster CPU will give you more performance boost than GPU acceleration for sure…
Wow, all I can say it thanks a lot. I have a new 5K iMac with a AMD Radeon Pro 580 video card. I had GPU acceleration turned on and I was getting horrible lag when using the brush in Lightroom. I just sort of figured that was the way it worked. Turned it off this morning and it’s easily 3-4 times faster. Makes a huge difference thanks again. Also, seems like when zooming in that it works a little faster too.
James, thank you for your feedback. It is unfortunate, but I have experienced similar issues on my iMac as well – turning off GPU acceleration made Lightroom work much faster.
So is it a bug then? Isn’t the purpose of GPU to accelerate Lightroom useability / operability? Why develop codes for it if the end result is functional slowdown?
I can’t say that. I have one of the new iMacs with a 580 video card as well and especially panning around a zoomed in image is much much better with GPU acceleration turned on.
Morning Nasim-
I have a late 2015 Retina 5k 27″ iMac running a 4 GHz i7. Top shelf at the time. Thoughts?
Thanks
Opps, forgot the graphics card: AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB
Sandy, I haven’t had much luck with GPU acceleration on iMacs, but your mileage might vary. Please try turning it on, working a bit, then go back and try turning it off to see if you see any changes / improvements.
Hi, Nasim. I have an old Dell Inspiron sporting a Core i5-3210M and a GeForce GT 630M (1 GB dedicated), and the GPU acceleration works just fine. I mean, it’s not a big difference, but it’s better than no acceleration. The most noticeable difference is on the panning and zooming feature, when it helps a lot. The screen resolution is 1366×768. I’m using the 385.41 Nvidia drivers and the latest version of Lightroom Classic CC on Windows 10 Home (1709).
So, I guess if you have a not so old GPU lying around, it’s worth a try.
Murilo, I haven’t had much luck with older GPUs to be honest. I had an older GeForce card with 1 GB VRAM on my desktop and I ended up changing to a faster, more modern card to get smoother Lightroom experience. While zooming and panning worked better, everything else was too slow…
Hi Nasim,
Just wanted to thank you for all that you have done for the photography community. Back in the day, I was a heavy user of slide film and the Nikon FE 2. Family matters kept me out of photography until last year when I bought the Nikon D7200 and it has been quit the learning curve. I appreciate your site and the information that you provide. It’s made the transition into the digital age much less taxing. Thanks again.
Thank you for your feedback Tommy, we really appreciate it!
Thank you for clearing up some of these mysteries. I now know why my main monitor renders much faster than the secondary monitor when scrolling through the catalog.
Murray, you are most welcome!
What differences, if any, do you see with LR version 7 vs last year’s version 6?
Some time ago I attempted to use this acceleration with an unsupported card and found that whenever I attempted to do anything with LR it would immediately crash. Opening LR and trying to uncheck the ‘Use Graphics Processor’ box also caused an immediate crash. The Windows 10 solution was in C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences\Lightroom 6 Preferences.agprefs. Open it with a text editor, scroll to the bottom and change the following line:
useAutoBahn = true
to the following
useAutoBahn = false
Save and close the file Lightroom 6 Preferences.agprefs
Launch Lightroom CC/6 again
So, it seems that the problem here is with LR – and not with the video cards currently available. Do other products (e.g. Capture One 11) use graphics more effectively? Seems like many photographers use LR _in spite_ of the performance problems.
David
Capture One Pro 7 did not have any. They started implementing CL option in version 8 onwards. Version 8 GPU implementation was buggy and rather error prone. Things got better with version 9 onwards. Version 11 is a speed demon! Very happy with it. I have Quadro 600 on which Silkypix DPD 8 and LR is very slow where as Darktable and Capture One Pro 11 are breezing fast on its mere 512 CUDA cores.
Thanks for this. I always assumed I should have it on. I’m using Lightroom 6.14 but on an older computer. Will turn it off next time I’m on it and can see the difference.
I have especially bought the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for a better Lightroom performance but LR seems to perform better with CPU disabled :-(
My experience agrees with the author’s recommendations: don’t bother with GPU acceleration if you are only using a “2K” display.
I built a new rig a year ago specifically for use with Lightroom (ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/FCyQQV with an 850 EVO SSD for a system disk) and it was a fabulous improvement. Moving photos to the M.2 SSD made a spectacular improvement. When I open a folder with 100+ large thumbnails, it now renders them all instantly.
However, at the time, I couldn’t afford a new graphics card. Well, this year I splurged on a 6GB GFX 1060 GPU and was hopeful that would speed things up even more. But I was wrong. Enabling the GPU acceleration on causes noticable and annoying delays when switching between pictures or between the Library and Develop modules.
According to www.diyphotography.net/adobe…rformance/ Adobe has promised to make performance improvements a priority. I hope that they succeed.
Interesting Nasim as I upgraded LR today and have experienced slow and jerky spot healing which I didn’t have before in 5.7. LR is closed now and my iMac is going to bed for the night, but tomorrow I’m going to try turning GPU acceleration off as suggested and see what happens. Spot healing was smooth and responsive before the upgrade. However, I’m confused, as you said “I have had cases where GPU acceleration introduced many software glitches, where ….. using gradient or spot healing tools were painfully slow”, but later on spot removal was under the list of tools that were not GPU accelerated. Have I misunderstood?
Capture One Pro 7 did not have any. They started implementing CL option in version 8 onwards. Version 8 GPU implementation was buggy and rather error prone. Things got better with version 9 onwards. Version 11 is a speed demon! Very happy with it. I have Quadro 600 on which Silkypix DPD 8 and LR is very slow where as Darktable and Capture One Pro 11 are breezing fast on its mere 512 CUDA cores.
Wow. Turning off the GPU acceleration made a huge difference. I have a brand new 27″ iMac, Intel i7 4.2 Ghz, AMD 580 with 8g. When I noticed the slow refresh/load in the Develop module, I just figured it was typical Lightroom performance. I never experienced any of the glitches you mentioned but I was not thrilled with the performance. In fact I actually rejected(x) photos thinking they were blurry when in fact they just didn’t load fast enough in the develop module. Thank you so much. I just signed up as a member. You deserve to be paid for sharing your knowledge. Love the site.
Sorry not to sing the same song but GPU acceleration does a huge difference on my MacBookPro 2016 (Radeon 460 graphics), as it did on my previous iMac 2011. It makes panning and zooming much faster and smooth, and is a considerable benefit for the brush and local retouch in general.
There is also one wrong statement in the article : adjustment brush does use GPU acceleration. Beside this, Nasim is perfectly right when he writes that GPU acceleration is targeting UHD and 4K/5K displays. In the case of 5K iMacs, the problem is the poor hardware implementation made by Apple, and if the GPU is weaker than the CPU, it will result in slowdowns. In that case, the best thing to do is to update the GPU driver if possible (unfortunately not for Macs) and, if the problem persists, just deactivate GPU acceleration.
GPU acceleration seems to be a challenging task for software editors. Phase One needed 4 generations of C1 to achieve acceptable performances, that was the same for DxO, and, now Lr and ACR just got the 2nd generation of their own GPU acceleration. This is a long term task.
Best (and happy new year to all).
Gilles, the adjustment brush and spot healing do NOT use GPU acceleration. You can test this very quickly on any machine: fire up GPU usage monitor, then use both tools. You will see that GPU usage will remain at zero, while CPU usage will spike up.
Hi John, yes you’re right. I thought the brush had GPU acceleration since Lr 7. My apologies.
Best, Gilles.
This “feature” made everything about Lightroom worse in every way for me! I’m running a 3.5 Intel Core-i7, 32GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 4GB No slouch SSD iMac and Lightroom runs like garbage. After I finally turned GPU acceleration off it was 17% better. It still sucks but it sucks less. If there was any other viable software alternative I’d already be leaving Adobe in the dust.
What about sharpening? Do GPU help with that?