Upgrade to GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Card?

[stockjock]

Now that Adobe seems to be taking more advantage of GPU's in Lightroom and Photoshop I was wondering if anybody knew if upgrading to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB card would make any noticeable difference in performance compared to my current GeForce GTX 960 2GB card?  Lightroom is very sluggish with my current system despite 32 GB of DDR4 RAM.  It might just be the 3 1/2 year old Intel i7 6700K processor, or maybe the Lightroom catalog with 160,000 images, or driving a 4K monitor?  But Lightroom slows to a crawl, especially after editing more than a couple of images and I would welcome any suggestions about improving its performance.  The last LR update seems a little more stable but I've only used it for couple of days so that might be wishful thinking ;-).

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Now that Adobe seems to be taking more advantage of GPU's in Lightroom and Photoshop I was wondering if anybody knew if upgrading to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB card would make any noticeable difference in performance compared to my current GeForce GTX 960 2GB card?  Lightroom is very sluggish with my current system despite 32 GB of DDR4 RAM.  It might just be the 3 1/2 year old Intel i7 6700K processor, or maybe the Lightroom catalog with 160,000 images, or driving a 4K monitor?  But Lightroom slows to a crawl, especially after editing more than a couple of images and I would welcome any suggestions about improving its performance.  The last LR update seems a little more stable but I've only used it for couple of days so that might be wishful thinking ;-).

Hi,

It's very hard to predict, but you probably will see some improvement as far as the hardware is slowing things down. The difficulty in predicting has to do with the unknown integration quality/level of GPU support in Lightroom. It often benefits most if an application was designed with hardware acceleration in mind. With Lightroom, and many other applications, parts of the codebase can be rewritten to make better use of GPU acceleration, parallel multi-threaded processing, etc., but it may not benefit as much as other applications (which might explain why Adobe seems to be relatively slow in upgrading this part of the codebase).

Besides the software, it also depends on the CPU/GPU interactions and other factors. For example, in principle the latest generation CPUs will process instructions faster unless they start to overheat and throttling sets in. Throttling may turn a much faster Intel i9 generation CPU into a slower machine than an i7 generation (case in point, the Dell XPS 15).

So, it will probably not hurt to upgrade the graphics adapter card, but it is hard to say how much of a difference it will make.

Cheers,
Bart

[Alan Goldhammer]

Now that Adobe seems to be taking more advantage of GPU's in Lightroom and Photoshop I was wondering if anybody knew if upgrading to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB card would make any noticeable difference in performance compared to my current GeForce GTX 960 2GB card?  Lightroom is very sluggish with my current system despite 32 GB of DDR4 RAM.  It might just be the 3 1/2 year old Intel i7 6700K processor, or maybe the Lightroom catalog with 160,000 images, or driving a 4K monitor?  But Lightroom slows to a crawl, especially after editing more than a couple of images and I would welcome any suggestions about improving its performance.  The last LR update seems a little more stable but I've only used it for couple of days so that might be wishful thinking ;-).

I don't think the catalog size has any impact on the GPU 'acceleration'  I have almost the exact same specification as you do except for 16GB RAM and a slightly less powerful CPU (4790K, no OC).  I have a new NEC multisynch monitor but not 4K.  GPU acceleration is enabled and I have no idea whether this is +/- as I've not turned it off to check.  I don't see any particular lag in LR though I just updated to the subscription version in January when I bought a Nikon Z 6 that was not supported by the stand alone LR6.  I did three panos using LR when we got back from Banff in July and LR did the job just fine (PT Gui would probably be a better choice for this job but I don't do many panos).  Best source of information on hardware requirements is on the Puget Systems website (they are a systems builder and have a section on media content development including LR and PS).

[Chris Kern]

I was wondering if anybody knew if upgrading to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB card would make any noticeable difference in performance compared to my current GeForce GTX 960 2GB card?  Lightroom is very sluggish with my current system despite 32 GB of DDR4 RAM.  It might just be the 3 1/2 year old Intel i7 6700K processor, or maybe the Lightroom catalog with 160,000 images, or driving a 4K monitor?

It's difficult for an end-user to determine the source of a computing bottleneck.  Traditional system-level "performance monitoring" tools are all but useless, and often are actually misleading because modern operating systems tend to adjust rapidly to changing demands through mechanisms such as sophisticated process scheduling and demand-paged virtual memory.  For quite a few years now, users of UNIX and UNIX-like systems have had access to an outstanding dynamic tracing utility which exploits counters within the operating system kernel to monitor a running application and I recently discovered that the tool, Dtrace, has now been ported by Microsoft to Windows (Windows 10 and above, only).  I don't use Windows myself any longer so I have no experience with this port, but if you want to identify a targeted hardware upgrade you can make to improve Lightroom's performance, this the application I would use to try to find the bottleneck.  If you're not comfortable working with this type of software yourself, you can probably find a local high school or college geek to do it for you.

[Alan Goldhammer]

It's difficult for an end-user to determine the source of a computing bottleneck.  Traditional system-level "performance monitoring" tools are all but useless, and often are actually misleading because modern operating systems tend to adjust rapidly to changing demands through mechanisms such as sophisticated process scheduling and demand-paged virtual memory.  For quite a few years now, users of UNIX and UNIX-like systems have had access to an outstanding dynamic tracing utility which exploits counters within the operating system kernel to monitor a running application and I recently discovered that the tool, Dtrace, has now been ported by Microsoft to Windows (Windows 10 and above, only).  I don't use Windows myself any longer so I have no experience with this port, but if you want to identify a targeted hardware upgrade you can make to improve Lightroom's performance, this the application I would use to try to find the bottleneck.  If you're not comfortable working with this type of software yourself, you can probably find a local high school or college geek to do it for you.

Hi Chris,
I just took a look at the link and I'm not sure that this will do much.  It's designed for those who get Windows 10 insider build versions before they are released to the public (at least that's my reading).  From the comments section it appears not be all that easy to install.

Alan

[Chris Kern]

It's designed for those who get Windows 10 insider build versions before they are released to the public (at least that's my reading).  From the comments section it appears not be all that easy to install.

As far as I know, joining the "Windows Insider" program simply involves registering for it.  As for installing Dtrace, as I say I no longer use Windows so I haven't tried the Microsoft port, but the instructions seem to be written for an end-user—albeit one who is accustomed to using this type of utility—rather than for an experienced software developer.  I don't think getting the utility running would be a heavy lift for a high school or college computer science geek.

[rasworth]

It's easy to sign up for the Insider Preview program, BUT one should do it on a spare, non-critical, W10 system.  I've been in it since its inception, and I have had to reload W10 a couple of times.

Richard Southworth

[Chris Kern]

It's easy to sign up for the Insider Preview program, BUT one should do it on a spare, non-critical, W10 system.

Yes, of course.  Back when I was still using Windows—I think the program was called the "Microsoft Developer Network" in those days—I used a separate boot disk to evaluate new revs of the operating system.  That allowed me to compare performance between versions in the same target hardware environment.

[sportmaster]

A 1070 GPU made a huge difference in my computer.

[stockjock]

A 1070 GPU made a huge difference in my computer.

Thanks for the input.  Were you coming from a lower end graphics card or no GPU at all?

[sportmaster]

A lower end card.