Lightroom Classic: debunking efficiency using the hardware and a plugin 🤦‍♂️ (Lua + SDK)

@steven_friedman_7261016 

Thanks for the question, I have updated the results and wrote them in a more clear way in the original post.

Right now, the only thing I am done is a reset on values on one picture and then incrementing values on one picture in a loop. My CPU is not max out when doing those tests, so there is room for speed if I may say so. My SSD is far from been at 100% too, where my database/catalog is.

For the test/plugin, right now I am simply "playing" with the values on one picture in a loop.

So the values are:

  "Temperature",
  "Tint",
  "Exposure",
  "Highlights",
  "Shadows",
  "Contrast",
  "Whites",
  "Blacks",
  "Texture",
  "Clarity",
  "Dehaze",
  "Vibrance",
  "Saturation",
  "Sharpness",
   "SharpenRadius",
  "SharpenDetail",
  "SharpenEdgeMasking",
  "LuminanceSmoothing",
  "LuminanceNoiseReductionDetail",
  "LuminanceNoiseReductionContrast",

And I am changing values with these SDK tools (that access the API of Lightroom):

• LrDevelopController.increment(param)
• LrDevelopController.setValue(param , value)

While doing another run, I saw that when the GPU is ON+FULL, the CPU is higher compare to when the GPU is at OFF. Now that is interesting.

Dual 4K though I only use one monitor at a time. 

@david_golding_1mvs2lwngpf9v

In my case, I am using  LRc on a 1440p (2560x1440 x10bits) and my other screen is not used for those tests since LRc does not scale on a second monitor.

That display should be very fast, especially with your 2070 video card. Currently Lightroom only works with 8 bits per channel for the display, we're hoping for an update to 10 bits someday if they can accomplish that without a significant performance hit.

Back in the Lightroom V8 era, I was using a 1920x1080 monitor and performance was fine. Upgraded to a 5K monitor and it slowed to a snail's pace pumping all those pixels. A faster video card helped a little but significant relief didn't come until V9. 

Switching to a 4k monitor was the biggest performance boost until V9.4. which fixed all but a couple sliders. Those were fixed with V10. No longer any develop performance issues for me though my largest raw files are only about 50-52 MB, Fuji X-T3. Larger raw files might be slower.

My next step is to reconnect my 5K monitor to see how it performs. 

When adding a faster video card to a FHD display, I saw very little improvement but that was also in the days when Lightroom made very little if any use of a video card. 

I've not run any benchmarks. I drag the sliders and if they are instantaneous then that meets my requirements. Today I experience no delays with the develop sliders on a 4K monitor with Lightroom at full screen. 

Since V10, they are all instantaneous for me with one exception that Adobe has accepted as a bug: Adjustment Brush with Auto Mask on slows down many following operations dramatically. The following edits randomly undo parts of the Auto Mask operation. Basically Auto Mask can only be used as the last Develop step.   

Because my video card only has 5GB and a 5K monitor benefits from at least an 8GB card, I expect a hit. With a 4GB card and a 4K monitor, almost 100% of the VRAM was used with several (most) of the sliders. Upgrading to a 5GB card; it still used almost all of the VRAM and the total utilization of the card increased from 36 to 38%. This leads me to believe that even better performance could be achieved with an 8GB card which if true, means that a 5K monitor could take advantage of about 16GB of VRAM.  

If the 5K monitor works, I'll post a note regarding the performance impact on my system. There have been issues with 5K monitors with Nvidia video cards on Windows so we'll see if Nvidia got the bugs worked out. 

@John_R_Ellis 

PurgetBench for LRc is a not to bad testing, but does use an external software that mimic your mouse, so you can't use your mouse for 45 minutes while it is running, and my goal is to make a benchmark that use only SDK/API's of LRc.

But PugetBench only tests "Develop Auto WB & Tone", which is hardly representative of Develop operations most users do. I think your approach using LrDevelopController to test many sliders could give much more representative results.

@david_golding_1mvs2lwngpf9v 

I was so happy to learn that there is a performance mode for the nVidia card, but when I looked up, it seems like I already put it there a long time ago.

Nevertheless, I did test it with max power settings vs consistent power and the results are in!

(I don't know how this table will end up in the post, finger cross)

So I can confirm that with power at maximum, you get about... 5% increse performance with "the slider test".