Smart Previews for performance

[thommy]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic version: 10.4

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi

Is using the option to use Smart Previews when editing still valid using for performance in the develop module?
In a article from Puget Systems below is stated

"Oddly, with smart previews present we actually saw a performance drop on most CPUs in the new version of Lightroom. In fact, if you compare both of the charts in this section, you will notice that while in Lightroom CC 2015.12 having smart previews allowed us to scroll through the images 20-40% faster, with Lightroom Classic CC it is actually slower. This is an odd result, but it looks like Adobe has simply optimized scrolling through images so well that having smart previews is actually a detriment rather than a help. So unless you need smart previews for non-performance reasons, we recommend skipping over them entirely in Lightroom Classic CC."

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...r-than-CC-2015-1065/#DevelopModuleImageScroll
The article is a little outdated from 2017 and I'm not sure to use or not to use "Smart Previews".
Could of course test it but would like to hear you experience or knowledge about this.

Thommy

 

[Jim Wilde]

I'm not sure that benchmark was testing the effect of using smart previews for editing, I think it was only testing the speed of scrolling through images in the Develop module when smart previews existed for those images, compared with the scrolling speed when smart previews had not been generated. It doesn't address the question of whether editing with smart previews is beneficial versus editing using the original files.