External Graphics Card For Laptop

[smoke665]

Anyone tried an external graphics card connected to a laptop via Thunderbolt port, for editing in Lr utilizing something like the desktop version of Nvidia's Quadro RTX 6000 24GB or the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB which is supposedly almost as fast?????

 

[smoke665]

No one????

 

[weepete]

Nope, gfx cards like that are total overkill for PS and LR. Check these benchmarks out:

Photoshop CC 2019: NVIDIA GeForce RTX Performance

Very little performance difference as soon as you hit a Vega 64 and even less if you get a GTX1060.

 

[smoke665]

Nope, gfx cards like that are total overkill for PS and LR. Check these benchmarks out:

Photoshop CC 2019: NVIDIA GeForce RTX Performance

Very little performance difference as soon as you hit a Vega 64 and even less if you get a GTX1060.

Interesting, I had felt somewhat the same way last year, but since 2018 there have been several updates. The latest LR Version 9 release seems to leverage more tasks on the graphics card, especially those which require rendering an image quickly. Nvidia came out with an updated driver in November for Studio, that I had to install as a result. Still the bottleneck appears to be in adjustment brushes. If your're working with a large number of images at a time adding a few brush adjustments to each can degrade performance.

 

[jcdeboever]

PS LR 3D effects and brushes can access the graphics card. Tearing or artifacting will occur in preview if 3D is disabled or using intergrated graphics. I know as I just built a rig for someone. Mostly for gaming but he uses PS and LR as well. NVMe and SsD drives, 16 to 32 gigs of ram, i7 or i9 CPUs really are more important. Workstation cards are nice in that the drivers are over the top stable but more geared towards 3D CAD, engineering software. A nice midlevel gaming gtx or rtx card is more than enough. Nvidia has a supporyed gpu list on the adobe site.

 

[weepete]

Interesting, I had felt somewhat the same way last year, but since 2018 there have been several updates. The latest LR Version 9 release seems to leverage more tasks on the graphics card, especially those which require rendering an image quickly. Nvidia came out with an updated driver in November for Studio, that I had to install as a result. Still the bottleneck appears to be in adjustment brushes. If your're working with a large number of images at a time adding a few brush adjustments to each can degrade performance.

Yeah I appreciate that and though it was written in 2018 the benchmarks are for Photoshop 2019. What's really interesting is there's no scaling in photoshop beyond the mid teir cards, so although the more updated versions might take more advantage for more processes it's unlikley that there'll be any significant performance increase. Looking at the supported gfx cards below, they're all really old so as long as your card has a couple of GB of VRAM it'll probably be ok. It'll be interesting to see how AMDs next gen 7nm CPUs perform, I they'll be quite good. Some of the task times look a bit random in those benchmarks too, so some operations work better with some gfx cards or processors. Lightroom should be very similar. Saying that, if you don't have a discrete GFX card something like a GTX1060 might not be a bad shout.

From Adobe Lightroom Classic GPU FAQ :

Suggested graphics cards
Graphics cards released in the year 2014 or afterwards that meet the minimum system requirements (listed above) should work.

• AMD: For AMD cards, consider using the Radeon R9 series of cards, such as the R9 270 through 290.
• NVIDIA: For NVIDIA cards, consider using a card from the GeForce GTX 760+ line (760, 770, 780, or later) or from the GeForce GTX 900 series.
• Intel: For Intel cards, Intel HD Graphics 4400+, 5000+, 510+, P530, P630, Iris Pro Graphics 5200, 6100+, P6300, P580 or later are required.

 

[smoke665]

@weepete yup I have the 1060 w/6gb. It started acting a little funky after installing LR, Ver. 9. The Studio driver released in November seems to have fixed the issues.

@jcdeboever I'm running a gaming laptop with I7, 16gb ram, SSD drive, internal HD, and an external SSD scratch disk through a Thunderbolt port. It flys through PS, but using a lot of brush adjustments in LR gets a little sluggish when I'm working on a lot images. The processor is strolling along but the fan on the graphics card is spinning up more then it seems like it should, since the last update.

 

[weepete]

What's the temps on your gfx card Smoke? I think you should have some bundled monitoring software with that card which should give you a temperature readout. It shouldn't be throttling till 83°C though I think the fan kicks in at 60°C. If you download FurMark > Home you should be able to run a stress test and adjust the fan curve. If you only use it for PS and lightroom you could just watch the temps while processing and set it to less aggressive, as long as it stays below that 83°C. Of course temps can also depend on your build and how well the airflow gets through your case.

 

[smoke665]

. It shouldn't be throttling till 83°C though I think the fan kicks in at 60°C. I

There was software bundled, rarely have it open when using LR, but that sounds about right on fan kicking on, Guess I need to investigate more.

 

[jcdeboever]

@weepete yup I have the 1060 w/6gb. It started acting a little funky after installing LR, Ver. 9. The Studio driver released in November seems to have fixed the issues.

@jcdeboever I'm running a gaming laptop with I7, 16gb ram, SSD drive, internal HD, and an external SSD scratch disk through a Thunderbolt port. It flys through PS, but using a lot of brush adjustments in LR gets a little sluggish when I'm working on a lot images. The processor is strolling along but the fan on the graphics card is spinning up more then it seems like it should, since the last update.

If your file is on a spin drive, it may be not caching correctly or the spin drive is cached and that is your bottleneck. The card is fine. It is more than likely that file is on the spin drive or the spin drive is lagging behind on the write cache. Do away with spin drives all together while editing and use spin drives for backing up. Best to mirror those or redundant the spin drive files on a cloud. Pick your poison. I personally raid or mirror the data drive and back up on a Amazon cloud. My super critical stuff (not my pics lol) are written (copied) to a double sided blue ray disc. Those are put into a safe deposit box at a bank. You could also use a san disk thumb drive for critical stuff. I don't because I have a SOP and a blue ray writer from back in the day.

 

[smoke665]

f your file is on a spin drive,

Image files only are on the internal HD. Adobe software, catalogs and cache are on the internal SSD. The external SSD is used for quick storage, but primarily as a Scratch Disk for Ps

 

[jcdeboever]

OK. Put your stuff on the ssd