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Lr cloud based desktop app minimal requirements. Mac question

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Guido Belli

Guido Belli

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Premium Cloud Member
Joined
Mar 19, 2016
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30
Lightroom Experience
Power User
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Lr 6.3.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 13 Ventura
Hi.
My iMac doesn't meet the minimal requirements needed to take advantage of the new AI features of Lr cloud based.
Adobe specifies that at least 2GB of VRAM are needed and recommends 4 to 8 GB.
Eric Chan writes in his article about the Denise feature the following: On macOS, prefer an Apple silicon machine with lots of memory.
"Lots of memory" is a little bit vague as technical spec. How big "lots of memory" should be?
In addition to that, new Mac processors sports a shared memory technology, and I could not find any information to know how the processor defines the size of memory assigned to VRAM. Is the processor sw to manage this? Is Lr itself in control of the matter?
Is anybody able to throw some light on this, please?
An answer by Adobe will be very much appreciated. Maybe Rikk Flohr can help.
Thank you!
Guido
 
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Yes, they haven't gone into great detail. macOS handles sharing the RAM and does a very good job. If you're buying a new Mac, I'd go for no less than 16GB of RAM since it's shared, more if budget allows.
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Yes, they haven't gone into great detail. macOS handles sharing the RAM and does a very good job. If you're buying a new Mac, I'd go for no less than 16GB of RAM since it's shared, more if budget allows.
Click to expand...
Thank you Victoria for your suggestion.
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Yes, they haven't gone into great detail. macOS handles sharing the RAM and does a very good job. If you're buying a new Mac, I'd go for no less than 16GB of RAM since it's shared, more if budget allows.
Click to expand...
Thank you Victoria for your reply.
I think I'll post the same question in Adobe Support Community.
Maybe they know....
 
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With my old iMac I could not run Topaz Denoise AI unless I cropped the file to 50%. AI eats VRAM. I knew more AI would be coming so when I got my new iMac in 2019 I made sure to future proof and got 8 GB VRAM. SSD drive and fast processor helps too. It takes Adobe Denoise 45 seconds to process a file but so did Topaz Photo AI and DXO PureRaw 3. My lowly 2020 MacBook Air with the M1 chip is faster.

You mentioned Lr and cloud based. There are two versions. Lightroom Classic or LrC is similar to LR6 and requires local file storage. Lightroom or Lr sends files to the cloud automatically. If you decide to get into this start with installing LrC only as you are used to LR6. A lot has changed since LR6 so you will be busy with that. Explore Lr later if you are interested. You don't have to use it.
 
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