Voila, LR 11.5 obviously does not use the GPU for panorama stitches ( ptGui does) but it does use it to convert Nef to Tif... and much faster than in version 10.4...
Many programs aren't well optimized for the hardware/OS combination... LR shows that in some part it could be 2.5 x faster, and probably even more.
So you can buy fast hardware, but speed is the sum of all. PtGUi and Fast Raw Viewer seem to me very well optimized. Photoshop certainly not.