The ever growing demands on computer hardware

Ian started a blog post The ever growing demands on computer hardware
23-04-12, 02:40 PM

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The ever growing demands on computer hardware

Having used Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 for a couple of months now, I am left with the realisation that it requires noticeably more computing ooomph than Lightroom 3 and earlier.

I haven't upgraded any of my computers, apart from some components, for at least four years and got away with it. The innards of my desktop PC at the office are almost five years old, based on a 2.8GHz dual core AMD Athlon 5600+ with 4GB RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1550 graphics card. My laptop is a bit newer, but also showing its age, although the [URL="http://dpnow.com/8371.html"]fitting of an SSD[/URL] in place of a hard disk drive has made a significant improvement.

Lightroom 4's responsiveness on my ageing desktop is, frankly, poor now. If I move a slider the effect can sometimes take several seconds to register. Exporting a reasonable number of images which have a lot of edits now takes minutes rather than seconds.

I also use Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 for video editing and this is a very time-consuming pastime. I can't benefit from Adobe's Mercury Engine Playback hardware acceleration via the latest multiple stream processor graphics cards, nor enhanced media object processing in the latest Intel and AMD processors, which also benefits GPU-accelerated processes in Photoshop CS6.

It's time to upgrade!

So I'm going to turn the process of upgrading my self-built system into a stage by stage experiment. I have a Kingston 128GB SSD ready and waiting to be installed for stage 1.

Stage 2 will see an upgrade probably to an affordable nVidia GT-550Ti graphics card, which is a good all-round performer, but crucially sports 192 CUDA stream processors and DDR5 memory, which should appreciably boost Photoshop CS6 and Premiere Pro usability.

Stage 3 will probably mean a change of motherboard and processor, because although the motherboard I currently use was state of the art 5 years ago, it's basically out of date and unable to run the latest Intel Core i or AMD FX 'Bulldozer' processors.

Stage 4 will explore how upgrading RAM impacts on system performance. I'll deliberately start with just 4GB, which most new systems are supplied with today, and then upgrade to 16GB.

At each stage I will measure real-world performance -it should be an interesting experiment. Stage 1 - the SSD upgrade - is ready to go. Watch out for an update!

Ian
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3 comments
- #1
  
  mike_j commented
  
  23-04-12, 04:31 PM
  
  Editing a comment
  
  I will be interesting to follow this. I too have noticed quite a hit with LR4 and my PC sounds about the same vintage and spec as yours.
  
  One system that I run, Twonky, which is a media server for the TV etc imposes quite an additional load I suspect.
- #2
  
  mike_j commented
  
  23-04-12, 04:54 PM
  
  Editing a comment
  
  Have you checked the Windows Experience Index as a matter of interest?
  
  My graphics index is down at 3.6, others are 5.3-6.5. Overall is 3.6 due to the graphics card rating.
- #3
  
  rogleale commented
  
  23-04-12, 05:18 PM
  
  Editing a comment
  
  You do need an upgrade Ian. I am running LR4.1RC which was a great improvement on LR4 in terms of responsiveness, but watching the Task Manager whilst working is quite interesting. I have a fairly rapid machine, home built and about two years old, running Windows 7 Home on an AMD Phenom II x 4 2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. With this set-up the slider response is almost instant, mostly un-measurable, and the RAM usage remains below 3GB most of the time. As a matter of interest my peerformance figures are:
  Processor 7.2
  Memory (RAM) 7.5
  Graphics 4.3
  Primary Disk 7.2
  This seems to bear out the Adobe statement that the graphics card is not too important regarding speed.
  
  All 4 cores are worked hard, for instance going from library to Develop produces a spike of about 85% CPU usage, and that is a lot of computing going on with 4 cores working.
  On an Acer laptop with a dual core LR4 is almost unusable because of the poor speed.
  
  Roger
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The ever growing demands on computer hardware

The ever growing demands on computer hardware