Lightroom Hardware

wellman

This may be a bit premature, since the 1.0 version isn't out yet, but I'll ask it anyway...

If you're using Lightroom (Beta 4 or 4.1) on Windows, what's your hardware and what's your user experience? I'm running on a P4 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM, a single SATA main drive, and my swap file on a secondary disk. My user experience with LR is OK, but not super-speedy. When I move sliders (Develop module) around, there's noticeable lag time before the image starts to update, and it takes about 1-2 sec for the edits to "click in" completely (8MP 20D RAWs).

Despite this, I'm a big fan of LR and plan to make it my primary developing and image management tool once it's released. I'd rather the entire UI be super-snappy, however. So, I'm wondering if an extra gig of RAM would make a significant difference, or if the CPU load is so high that I'd be better off saving up for a Core2Duo rig.

Any thoughts/experiences? Thanks!

marlinspike

From someone who loved and still loves RSP, Lightroom is garbage, pure garbage. Even with my new laptop (T7400 core 2 duo 2.16ghz cpu 1gb pc5300 ram 7200rpm HDD SATA150) it runs slightly slower than RSP did on my old system (p4 2.4ghz 1gb pc2100 ram 7200rpm ATA100). Anything I do in RSP on my new system is instantaneous.

claudermilk

AMD X2 4200+ (dual 2.2GHz cores), 2GB RAM, several fast SATA II drives, XFX GeForce 6800X video.

LR was slooooow. Like marlinspike, I did not like it at all & it's now removed from my system. The UI is very pretty, but that's really the only good thing I can say about it.

marlof

I have a pretty recent PC (can't remember the specs, only know I have 2 gb of RAM and only one hard disk), and LR is workable, but not fast. I still have my hopes up for the release version, since also Lightzone 2.0 beta was dog slow on my computer, and the released version is way faster.

cmason

I have a 3000+ AMD, 1GB RAM, and a mid range video card. The latest beta, 4.1, is actually usable. The trick was to turn off all the thumbnail and preview building. I do that manually now, when I am away from the PC, since it sucks up resources. Once I did that, it is really usable. Not perfect, but this is beta. For betas, they typically have lots of debug code in there, and that will get stripped out for GA.

Anyway, I have to assume that the final version will be far speedier, and I assume speedier than say Bridge, which is only marginally better than Lightroom beta if you ask me. So I assume I won't need newer hardware, and mine is getting to be low to mid range now.

kres

LR was running pretty slow on my AMD64/ 2G/ SATA box. From what I can tell it's STUFFED with debug code.

My GUESS is that we will see a Beta5 / or Release Canidate build that will run faster come January.

Still, when it isn't eating my harddrive and memory, I like the workflow alot. It also seems to do a pretty good job of bulk processing RAW image quality.