What makes an editing PC fast - good video card (gpu) or the processor (cpu)?

[haring]

I want to upgrade my computer. I am running a 3gen i7 processor a geforce 1050.

I find that lightroom is slow when I scroll through photos in develop mode? Faster rendering in develop mode would make my editing faster...

What should I upgrade? Processor or the video card? I would like to hear opinions from photographers or videographers who have done the upgrade... I already upgraded the hard drive to ssd.

Thanks a bunch!

[Rhossydd]

Fast everything ;-)
Possibly the least important bit of yours to upgrade is the video card. If you're moving up from a 3rd gen CPU you'll have to upgrade motherboard and ram too. So you might as well add a M2 system drive and they seem to be a step above a 'normal' SATA SSD.

I built a new system last year,  i7-10700K 5.1ghz (10th gen) 32gb ram, GTX1050, M2 SSD and Lightroom runs very sweetly in all modules.
It happily edits video in 4k in Resolve too.
To get anything much better would require spending a huge amount more.

[tonysiciliano1]

Check out Puget Systems hardware for Photoshop Review (they also have a review on their site for LR):
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Photoshop-139/Hardware-Recommendations

[mcbroomf]

With a new MB you might also consider a 2nd M2 drive to use for Lightroom cache (and PS if you use it).

Also you don't mention the size of your files or whether you are doing basic editing or HDR/Pano editing with LR, or focus stacking in PS.  At least 32GB RAM with 2 slots to allow adding a 2nd pair if you are paging.

[haring]

Fast everything ;-)
Possibly the least important bit of yours to upgrade is the video card. If you're moving up from a 3rd gen CPU you'll have to upgrade motherboard and ram too. So you might as well add a M2 system drive and they seem to be a step above a 'normal' SATA SSD.

I built a new system last year,  i7-10700K 5.1ghz (10th gen) 32gb ram, GTX1050, M2 SSD and Lightroom runs very sweetly in all modules.
It happily edits video in 4k in Resolve too.
To get anything much better would require spending a huge amount more.

Do you see a difference in scroll mode in lightroom?

[PeterAit]

Fire up the performance tab of Task Manager. See how the GPU and CPU usage compare when you are scrolling. That'll answer your question.

[haring]

You are so right!!!!

[Rhossydd]

Do you see a difference in scroll mode in lightroom?

That's never really been a problem to me before the upgrade, so an improvement, but nothing staggering.

FWIW my system drive, catalogue and ACR cache were all on SSDs before.

[haring]

That's never really been a problem to me before the upgrade, so an improvement, but nothing staggering.

FWIW my system drive, catalogue and ACR cache were all on SSDs before.

I see. No regular 7200rpm hard drives any more, I guess.

[haring]

You are so right!!!!

My computer uses the processor more than anything else.

[Rhossydd]

I see. No regular 7200rpm hard drives any more, I guess.

All my original image files are on HDDs. Excepting import & export, LR only deals with the original files (inc side cars) individually, so there's less advantage having them on SSDs.

[bellevuefineart]

I think both the CPU and GPU are important, as well as the drives. The number of CPU cores that PS or LR can use is 8 from everything I've read. Beyond that PS can't really take advantage of more cores. But if you multitask, the system can take advantage of more cores for other system work or applications.

As for the GPU, the monitors you use will tax them as well as the programs being used. I got a Wacom 32" pen monitor and a BenQ 27" 4K side monitor, and my system got bogged down. My answer was to build a new PC.

I went with
2 M2 drives, 1TB each
4 SSD drives,8TB, 4TB x 3
16 core Ryzen
NVIDIA 3090

Some of this is overkill for PS and LR, but it runs smooth, saves fast, and video rendering is lightning fast.

[nemophoto]

It's really a combo of everything. To me the rank is CPU, SSD and GPU. I really haven't found that processing is much faster with a good GPU than only a so-so GPU. Some software is better than others in using the GPU, but LR is just plain kludgie.