Curious to see if any new iMac Pro Owners (8,10, 14 or 18 core) who use Lightroom noticed any substantial increase in performance with the new Lightroom 7.2 update. I'm a 2014 MacBook Pro owner and received a nice performance increase but am considering an iMac Pro. I'm hoping to see how much of a performance increase I would roughly get if I did upgrade. Thanks!
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iMac Pro iMac Pro Lightroom 7.2
- Thread starter libertyranger10
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I'm still using LR 6.14 (non CC). I downloaded Classic 7.2 and ran some benchmark that I'd used recently to compare my 2014 iMac i7 to 10-core iMac pro, and I am quite impressed with the improvements Adobe made. Biggest is in import and preview generation, where 7.2 is a bit more than twice as fast as 6.14. Export is 60 percent faster. Both make good use of all cores. Scrolling the library grid is about the same, but scanning through individual photos in either full size or 1 to 1 is much quicker. In Develop, brushes are much more responsive, almost no lag. Turning off GPU shows that LR is using it to good effect. Good job Adobe.
Awesome! It looks like your hardware is similar to what I would be upgrading to should I purchase an iMac Pro. Do you see a large speed increase between the iMac 2014 and your new 10 core iMac Pro?
The difference between the 2014 iMac and iMac Pro is mostly in building previews and export, with the iMac Pro 77% faster in previews and 175% for export.
I had posted my Lightroom experience in a different thread before:
I went for the 10 core, 64, 1 TB, Vega 64 system. My old system was a 6 core i7 Windows based machine which was slightly faster than my MacBook 13" i5 from 2015.
In January when I migrated I run a test with 727 RAW files. I loaded them onto the same empty catalog with a wiped preview cache sitting on an SSD. I loaded and copied the images and created 1:1 previews in parallel.
Windows i7 6 core: 42 minutes, 37 seconds
iMac Pro: 10 minutes, 33 seconds
Regarding how much LR benefits from multiple cores. Here is a screen print I took from the Activity Monitor during above import:
While some felt that LR prior 7.2 wouldn't support more than 4 to 6 cores, my experience was different. Would be interesting to see how this looks on a 18 core machine.
Approx. 2 weeks ago I came home from a shoot with 2,300 images. It's amazing how the iMac Pro is processing them. Best of all, after the first 20 photos are loaded, I can start working and make my first run to discard those which are not tack sharp.
This was basically not possible on the old machine due to the lag moving from photo to photo. I had to wait for 2 to 3 hours until the job was completely loaded and rendered before I could make my first run.
On the iMac Pro this is easy while the system stays quiet and I can't hear the fan.
The above was prior 7.2 which should still give you an indication. With 7.2 during edit it feels like slightly faster. I haven't had a large import/preview job since I am on 7.2.
Nice results. Thank you for sharing these! Definitely looks like the multiple cores are being utilized. Supposedly with 7.2, Adobe has optimized the software for greater use of those extra cores.
This is the info I was looking for. I bet this could even start to nibble at the lag in my Palettegear. Here goes $10K, LOL!
Also, I am bit taken aback by the LR render times given on here, I don't use it to catalog or edit selects so these are eye opening. Photo Mechanic will render a 3,000 image job shot on 24 & 46MP cameras in less than 15 seconds on my 2017 "15 rMBP. It takes about 90 seconds on my 2010 MP with a 2GB card.
I then copy the work set to export to a folder that LR hits up. The edits are rarely bigger than 600 finals so it seems to render fine.
Also, I am bit taken aback by the LR render times given on here, I don't use it to catalog or edit selects so these are eye opening. Photo Mechanic will render a 3,000 image job shot on 24 & 46MP cameras in less than 15 seconds on my 2017 "15 rMBP. It takes about 90 seconds on my 2010 MP with a 2GB card.
I then copy the work set to export to a folder that LR hits up. The edits are rarely bigger than 600 finals so it seems to render fine.
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So...I bought a new system..
I got the 10x 128GB / 16GB / 2TB. I also ordered a 1TB OWC Envoy Pro (1800 read) for boot clone and scratch disk and a TB3 4TB SSD RAID (1500 read) as a work disk. Attached will be 96TB on three more 4 bay TB3 cases.
I am pretty sure I am running a direct cooling line to the vents on this bad boy! I expect it to devour D850 and 60MP medium format raw files, because it needs to. This also somewhat future proofs my occasional output of B roll.
I got the 10x 128GB / 16GB / 2TB. I also ordered a 1TB OWC Envoy Pro (1800 read) for boot clone and scratch disk and a TB3 4TB SSD RAID (1500 read) as a work disk. Attached will be 96TB on three more 4 bay TB3 cases.
I am pretty sure I am running a direct cooling line to the vents on this bad boy! I expect it to devour D850 and 60MP medium format raw files, because it needs to. This also somewhat future proofs my occasional output of B roll.
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So...I bought a new system..
I got the 10x 128GB / 16GB / 2TB. I also ordered a 1TB OWC Envoy Pro (1800 read) for boot clone and scratch disk and a TB3 4TB SSD RAID (1500 read) as a work disk. Attached will be 96TB on three more 4 bay TB3 cases.
I am pretty sure I am running a direct cooling line to the vents on this bad boy! I expect it to devour D850 and 60MP medium format raw files, because it needs to. This also somewhat future proofs my occasional output of B roll.
Congrats! That will be an amazing machine. Be sure to post some before and after lightroom tests on whatever machine you're currently using! Excited for you!
[doublepost=1519436884][/doublepost]https://photographylife.com/lightroom-6-vs-cc-7-1-vs-7-2-performance-comparison
Found this today. Neat to see the comparison between the 2017 MacBook Pro with i7 processor and the iMac Pro.
So...I bought a new system..
I got the 10x 128GB / 16GB / 2TB. I also ordered a 1TB OWC Envoy Pro (1800 read) for boot clone and scratch disk and a TB3 4TB SSD RAID (1500 read) as a work disk. Attached will be 96TB on three more 4 bay TB3 cases.
I am pretty sure I am running a direct cooling line to the vents on this bad boy! I expect it to devour D850 and 60MP medium format raw files, because it needs to. This also somewhat future proofs my occasional output of B roll.
Wonderful! So excited for you!
Any thoughts on this little issue I'm facing....?
New iMP, 10core, 64gb, Vega 64. I moved Lightroom over from my old iMac and everything seemed fine. It opened up ok, all my files are there. Exporting full res jpegs from D850 raw files is super fast but importing is essentially dead!
If I try to import from either an XQD card, or copy images to the iMP then import from there, it's taking forever. I tried to do 50 files at once and after 15 minutes it had done about half. Something is not right! Files are stored on an external Sandisk Extreme 900 via USB C, so plenty of speed there.
When it imports, it also opens up the folder tree on the left handmade of the library module and slowly populates the image count for each folder, as it slowly imports images. Tried to reinstall Lightroom but with no help.
I fly away tomorrow for a week so right now my only thought it so wipe the iMP completely and start from scratch to see if somehow, something about the Lightroom install has gone wrong.
New iMP, 10core, 64gb, Vega 64. I moved Lightroom over from my old iMac and everything seemed fine. It opened up ok, all my files are there. Exporting full res jpegs from D850 raw files is super fast but importing is essentially dead!
If I try to import from either an XQD card, or copy images to the iMP then import from there, it's taking forever. I tried to do 50 files at once and after 15 minutes it had done about half. Something is not right! Files are stored on an external Sandisk Extreme 900 via USB C, so plenty of speed there.
When it imports, it also opens up the folder tree on the left handmade of the library module and slowly populates the image count for each folder, as it slowly imports images. Tried to reinstall Lightroom but with no help.
I fly away tomorrow for a week so right now my only thought it so wipe the iMP completely and start from scratch to see if somehow, something about the Lightroom install has gone wrong.
Just done so now. I hope someone can figure this one out. If I wipe the machine and start again and it still does it....oh O don't even want to think about that...! ha
I’d start with trying to reinstall Lightroom. Imports from my 5DsR compact flash and 1DX Mark II on CFast are lightning fast.
Ok problem solved!!
I reformatted the external Sandisk Extreme 900 and copied my images across again. Then tried to import a bulk of 93 raws from the D850 and it did it in about 10 seconds. Finally!!
Glad you solved the issue and that it didn’t take a whole reinstall of the OS. You are flying now!
I have the new imac pro (8 core), I didn't get it customised or boosted in any way, just straight up as it comes. It is no faster than my very old imac or my macbook pro! Tonight Lightroom CC is so slow, Im sitting waiting for it to catch up, the spinning wheel is constantly going. Now it isn't making the changes anymore. I am going to have to export my file and reimport (to get rid of the history) so that I can keep on working, the problem with that is I will then have to work with tif when I prefer nef and I can't revert any edits! This is exactly what I was having to do with the old imac, and this is what I was trying to avoid when I spent >$7299 on the imac pro.Thats a bit ******!
I have never seen spinning wheel with Lightroom on iMac Pro. Something is wrong with your setup, Lightroom is most certainly significantly faster on my machine. Give us some details and maybe we can help. And why would you export and reimport?
My iMac Pro 10-core is also significantly faster than my trash can 6-core nMac Pro, as well as my old cMac Pro 6-core. I’ve never once seen the spinning beach ball with Lightroom using the computer.
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7.2 Release note (items related to performance)
While this update of Lightroom Classic (7.2) focuses primarily on performance enhancements such as batch processing, I’m excited that the team has also added several small, yet powerful features, to help us quickly find our images in the Library module and more!
Performance Enhancements
First, by working with our partners at Intel, the team was able to make significant strides to increase the performance of multi-core machines that have 12GB (or more) of RAM. Regardless of how many cores your machine has, the code that optimizes CPU and memory usage is scalable so you will see improvements, but in general, if you have small number of cores, you will see a smaller increase in performance than if you have more cores (in which case you should see a larger increase in performance).
Here are the areas where you should see the largest performance gains:
• Faster import, auto import, preview generation and export
• Faster moving from one image to the next in Loupe View and the Develop module
• Faster rendering of adjustments in Develop
• Faster batch merge operations of HDR/Panos
• Functions in the app (such as preview creation on import and batch exporting), will not slow down over time or with extended use (particularly on Windows machines).