Having such high memory use is not desirable. If you get more demanding needs later on then you could be pushed into the red zone. Doing all of that swapping isn't good for SSD life and there is likely some performance hit, although less than if you were on Intel. If you are going to keep this machine for a long time I'd future proof it with as much memory as you can afford, within reason.
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Does my M2 have too little memory for Lightroom?
- Thread starter Moriske
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The GPU usage is what does it. I can easily go into yellow/red memory pressure on my M1 with 16GB with basic edits on a handful 20MP RAW photos. The GPU uses a sizable chunk of unified memory.
You can disable GPU acceleration… and memory pressure may stay well within green, but Lightroom won’t feel nearly fast during adjustments.
So it’s better to leave GPU acceleration enabled and don’t obsess over watching the memory pressure, as LR will still perform much faster than with GPU off.
Another thing that helps, if you really need it, is use smart previews for editing instead. Make sure you generate smart previews for your existing photos and enable the checkbox in settings. That will reduce memory usage.
You can disable GPU acceleration… and memory pressure may stay well within green, but Lightroom won’t feel nearly fast during adjustments.
So it’s better to leave GPU acceleration enabled and don’t obsess over watching the memory pressure, as LR will still perform much faster than with GPU off.
Another thing that helps, if you really need it, is use smart previews for editing instead. Make sure you generate smart previews for your existing photos and enable the checkbox in settings. That will reduce memory usage.
