I was checking Puget Systems Lightroom Classic benchmarks a while ago, comparing performance between Zen2 and the 10th gen of Intel GPUs. Now I’m looking into upgrading my system, maybe you guys can help me out on this one.
I do photo editing with a Ryzen 1600 and a GTX 1050, and since I recently tried a PC with a 9900K and a 2080Ti I was amazed at how nice and snappy Lightroom felt, it was truly a huge performance jump, the RAW photo previews loaded instantly, zooming never lagged, all the adjustments were reflected on the image in real time… Good stuff.
Since AMD decided us X370 early adopters won’t be able to run Zen 3 CPUs, despite A320 boards and B350 getting support for it (and all the proof that X470 boards that run them are identical in some cases to their previous generation), I wanted to go back to Intel CPUs after seeing the stellar performance of Alder Lake. It surely is faster than a 9900K on those tasks, but I still have some small doubts
My questions are:
-Will using Windows 10 LTSC and not the latest 11 build leave lots of performance on the table?
-Will not having a high end GPU degrade my experience? As far as I know GPU acceleration won’t matter much unless I upgrade to a 4K display down the line.
-Has anyone tested those CPUs in productivity? It could be worth upgrading to a 10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard instead for the cheap instead of dealing with 1st generation issues like Zen1.
All the Win 10 vs 11 differences that many reviewers measure seem to focus on gaming performance differences. I largely think there won’t be much performance gap right now. While Alder Lake is meant to work better with Win 11 due to the scheduler and AL’s E & P cores, right now I don’t know how much tuning is specific to Lightroom on Win 11 with that CPU.
I was looking up the differences that a GPU makes for Lightroom and was surprised to learn that the GPU acceleration takes place only in the Develop mode. All the rest of the performance is from the CPU. I would wager there is no discernable difference on each OS.
If I’m also not mistaken, you should see a decent boost in performance if you just upgrade the CPU to a 2700x which the X370 should support. I bought a used one from Ebay for around $125 that I used for almost a year and I thought that CPU was great.
It’s also not a bad idea to get a 10900k and pair it with a decent board, you’ll definitely see a lot of performance boost there.
I’m currently using 5950x paired with a B550 board and Lightroom works super smooth on it currently, it even plays back 4k video seamlessly. Though I do have it paired with a 3080 FTW3 Ultra, am not positive which does the 4k processing the most as I see usage on both during playback.
I’m looking into putting a 3080 FE in my PC and just updating the CPU and motherboard down the line to a 10900K/12600K/12700K right now.
Seems like the best thing to do since I bet prices will go a bit under after Zen 3+ releases and getting one of those Founders cards will be easy if i’m quick enough.
Got a 3070 a few weeks ago but I don’t think it will be enough for high framerate 4K gaming
Zen 3 CPUs have had some really competitive pricing past week or so. As have the 10th and 11th gen CPUs. Honestly either one of the top tier performing CPU are fair game in performance and I think most users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference with similar setups.
One other factor in the Lightroom speedy performance to factor in is the RAM. I have 64 GB of RAM and that sucker uses like 40 GB easily and adds more when doing some processing. Having that much RAM I think helps in loading previews and navigating through high resolution photos and videos. I have all my photos in RAW and honestly the entire process is seamless. It builds the smart previews on first import which takes less than a minute for over 1k files of Ultra fine RAW .NEF files.
In short, pairing a high performance CPU with a high performance GPU and tons of RAM you can’t go wrong and get a buttery smooth experience overall.