Upgrading my cheese grater to improve Lightroom performance

[ellarsee]

Lightroom Version Number

15.3

Operating System

1. macOS 15 Sequoia

When I was looking into replacing my cheesegrater with a studio I saw someone asked a LR performance issue here and noted that detail. I was also surprised to read that LR didn't make use of more than 32G of RAM.

For many years I've been running previous generations of higher end macs, rather than spending the same money on a newer lower end. The past couple of cycles have been motivated by no longer being able to run LR on an OS that supports the hardware that I had. My most recent upgrade was to a 2019 cheesegrater: 3.2 GHz, 16 core, 96 GB RAM, and relevant to this query: AMD Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB

Some weeks back, I realized that with the general increase in price of RAM and SSD, and Apple's locked in contract prices, the Apple Tax on RAM and storage wasn't much over, and might even be lower than just buying it elsewhere. I started looking at Mac Studios and found out that new ones with over 1TB of storage just aren't available for months. Eventually work settled down enough that I had a few minutes to look at the used market, and if the hardware is available even used prices are exorbitant.

In general, unless I'm working on an insanely large astrolandscape panorama, with a stupidly large number of edits, my system mostly keeps up pretty well, until I try to use the new noise reduction features, at which point it bogs down like a 1980's time share computer the night before a programming class's assignment is due.

At first glance, it seems that I could upgrade the graphics card for a lot less money than I could buy either a studio or mac pro with sufficient storage. What would be the graphics card to look for for best performance at a reasonable bang for buck, either new or used? Some research points to the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X. How much improvement would that gain me? And would that improve things like the AI noise reduction? Or would that require a newer mac with AI capable chips?

It seems that an M4 Max Studio would gain me a 4-6 times speed up, but at a cost of about $6,000.

It does peeve me that it is impossible to find price/performance benchmarks, particularly at current street prices.

​

 

[clee01l]

Something to consider. Intel Macs are obsolete and MacOS 26 is the last version that will be released that will run on Intel. macOS 27 will be released in 3-4 months


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[camner]

It seems that an M4 Max Studio would gain me a 4-6 times speed up, but at a cost of about $6,000.

I don’t understand this price. I purchased an M4 Max Studio with 64GB RAM and a 1TB SSD (and even upgraded the CPU/GPU cores a bit) for much less than $6K. It runs circles around the 2020 27” iMac it replaced, and has never come close to choking on anything I throw at it using LrC, PS, Topaz, etc. (I also keep WAY too many browser window open at once, which leads Chrome to occupy over 20MB RAM, according to Activity Monitor, though I understand that the 20MB figure doesn’t represent how much memory Chrome is currently using of the 64GB actual RAM).

 

[clee01l]

I don’t understand this price. I purchased an M4 Max Studio with 64GB RAM and a 1TB SSD (and even upgraded the CPU/GPU cores a bit) for much less than $6K. It runs circles around the 2020 27” iMac it replaced, and has never come close to choking on anything I throw at it using LrC, PS, Topaz, etc. (I also keep WAY too many browser window open at once, which leads Chrome to occupy over 20MB RAM, according to Activity Monitor, though I understand that the 20MB figure doesn’t represent how much memory Chrome is currently using of the 64GB actual RAM).

I agree unless the OP is using Canadian $. I just priced a 36Gb M4 Max Mac Studio w/ 1TB of SDD space. was $2199USD

More agressive Maxed out. M3 Ultra with m3-ultra-chip-32-core-cpu-80-core-gpu-96gb-memory-2tb-storage. Id $5899USD

 

[ellarsee]

For reasons, I want at least 4TB of drive. My current mac pro has 2TB of Apple SSD and an extra 4TB in a PCIE card. That adds a big chunk to the price.
Also, look on ebay at what is available these days, and for what prices.

I guess that I do have a fair collection of Apple hardware that will end up being converted to Linux boxes. I do hate how Adobe and Apple conspire to make perfectly functional hardware obsolete.

I will say that M3 Ultra with m3-ultra-chip-32-core-cpu-80-core-gpu-96gb-memory-2tb-storage. Id $5899USD sounds a lot like $6K, and that's before you add another $1000 to bump it up to 4TB, and another $600 in taxes etc.

When I was pricing things out on the apple website, I was assuming that I'd need at least 64 GB of RAM, especially since it can't be upgraded after the fact. I might have been able to save some going with less RAM.

I did find a nicely spec'ed macbook pro at a place in LA for $5200, which by the time tax was dealt with ended up being spitting distance of $6K.

I'll also note that I'm perfectly happy with Sequoia. I haven't found any reason to want to change to a newer OS, at least until Adobe decides that they won't support it any more.

Once the new systems come out, and I presume Apple starts paying post AI prices on RAM and SSD, what will they end up costing?

 

[bobsomrak]

Canceling support for Intel Macs is a wise decision for Adobe, Apple and most users. It probably costs a lot to support two OS's and Processors. For the users that money can be spent on improving the product. My perfectly good Intel iMac had to be replaced because it would not run the new software but it now found a new home for someone that just does basic stuff very fast and I am happy with my M4 Pro Mac Mini.

 

[clee01l]

For reasons, I want at least 4TB of drive. My current mac pro has 2TB of Apple SSD and an extra 4TB in a PCIE card.

I have a Mac Studio with a 1TB internal SSD. In a Thunderbolt 4 DAS (40Gbps), I have an additional 63TB. For processing purposes, EHD are cheaper and have larger capacity. I will only replace HDDs with SDDs when I can get 10-20TB on a single volume and at HDD prices. There is no reason to install extra storage internally especially at Apple prices.

I will say that M3 Ultra with m3-ultra-chip-32-core-cpu-80-core-gpu-96gb-memory-2tb-storage. Id $5899USD sounds a lot like $6K, and that's before you add another $1000 to bump it up to 4TB, and another $600 in taxes etc.

Now you are talking about an M3 Ultra. Earlier you said:

It seems that an M4 Max Studio would gain me a 4-6 times speed up, but at a cost of about $6,000.

An M4 Max is very different from an M4 Ultra both in utility and price.

 

[Gnits]

I have a Mac Studio with a 1TB internal SSD. In a Thunderbolt 4 DAS (40Gbps), I have an additional 63TB. For processing purposes, EHD are cheaper and have larger capacity. I will only replace HDDs with SDDs when I can get 10-20TB on a single volume and at HDD prices. There is no reason to install extra storage internally especially at Apple prices.

If I was upgrading to Mac I would use this approach.

 

[ellarsee]

I have a Mac Studio with a 1TB internal SSD. In a Thunderbolt 4 DAS (40Gbps), I have an additional 63TB. For processing purposes, EHD are cheaper and have larger capacity. I will only replace HDDs with SDDs when I can get 10-20TB on a single volume and at HDD prices. There is no reason to install extra storage internally especially at Apple prices.

Good for you, it is possible that our needs and desires are different.

Now you are talking about an M3 Ultra. Earlier you said:

I was quoting someone discussing what they bought for $6000.

An M4 Max is very different from an M4 Ultra both in utility and price.

Yes they are, and in my research the M4 max studio was the one to get.

 

[ellarsee]

I take it that nobody actually knows what the Lightroom performance gain would be of upgrading my video card. It seemed that it might be possible to gain a jump in performance for something between $600 and $1300, which would make my system last until prices come back down. In the 40+ years that I've been buying computers, I've never seen prices jump substantially in the way that they have in the past few months. The strategy that has worked for me for a long time was to put off purchases as long as feasible, and when I did upgrade get a much larger boost in performance for my dollar.

 

[clee01l]

I take it that nobody actually knows what the Lightroom performance gain would be of upgrading my video card. It seemed that it might be possible to gain a jump in performance for something between $600 and $1300, which would make my system last until prices come back down. In the 40+ years that I've been buying computers, I've never seen prices jump substantially in the way that they have in the past few months. The strategy that has worked for me for a long time was to put off purchases as long as feasible, and when I did upgrade get a much larger boost in performance for my dollar.

Your system will be obsolete and no longer updateable after September/October. You will be forever stuck with MacOS v26.x Even $600 is an unwise investment. You would be better armed to watch WWDC today to see what new thing Apple is going to be releaseing in the Fall.

 

[ellarsee]

Your system will be obsolete and no longer updateable after September/October. You will be forever stuck with MacOS v26.x Even $600 is an unwise investment. You would be better armed to watch WWDC today to see what new thing Apple is going to be releaseing in the Fall.

Well that changes everything if my computer will stop working in three months and will no longer run lightroom.

 

[clee01l]

Your Computer will not stop working nor will Lightroom. What will happen is that Adobe will not release a version after v15.x that will run on an Intel Mac. Furthermore, you will not be able to upgrade your MacOS beyond MacOS26.x. This will happen in 3-4 months .

Apple has announced widely that all of their existing Intel Macs will not be supported on any version after MacOS v26. The have also notified users running Intel Apps on Rosetta that Rosetta will be discontinued with the release of MacOS27. So all existing Intel compiled apps will stop working on Silicon chipped computers.

 

[ellarsee]

Your Computer will not stop working nor will Lightroom. What will happen is that Adobe will not release a version after v15.x that will run on an Intel Mac. Furthermore, you will not be able to upgrade your MacOS beyond MacOS26.x. This will happen in 3-4 months .

Apple has announced widely that all of their existing Intel Macs will not be supported on any version after MacOS v26. The have also notified users running Intel Apps on Rosetta that Rosetta will be discontinued with the release of MacOS27. So all existing Intel compiled apps will stop working on Silicon chipped computers.

I'm still running macos 15. I have seen absolutely no advantage to 26. It has no features that interest me. So, until Adobe says that they will stop my software from running on an Intel processor, the lack of running a newer version of Macos is of absolutely no concern to me.

About 60 years ago a guy named Gordon Moore observed something that basically meant that the longer you wait to update your hardware the more performance you can get for your money. That basically means the doodad on my wrist has more processing power than a supercomputer did when I spent $2000 to buy my first computer ca 1985. Over the past few months there has been a glitch in that curve due to supply and demand and all of a sudden prices for memory and storage have shot through the roof. My first thought was that since Apple hardware, for reasons, didn't have that huge price jump yet, it would be a good excuse to update my system now rather than in a year or two as planned, except that new apple systems with the specs I want are not available.

In most respects the system on my desk is a processing monster, there are only a couple of situations where I notice any lack in its performance, most frequently when I'm doing a denoise processing on a large group of files. If I can spend a little bit of money to speed that up, and postpone buying a whole new system until I can get something many times more powerful for the same money as buying one now, that would be great. I just need to quantify what the increase in performance for those functions would be in going from the video card I have now, to an upgraded one. It's a very simple numerical question.

I don't care about new features in the OS, I care about whether I can run Lightroom on my hardware. At some point Adobe will require Macos 27 or later, and then I won't be able to upgrade Lightroom. If that date is more than two years in the future, that is all I really care about right now.

 

[clee01l]

If that date is more than two years in the future, that is all I really care about right now.

That date is 3-4 months away not 2 years. As long as you understand the limitations that's fine, Just as long as you don't come back here in 5 months griping because you can run the latest version of Classic on your outdated computer.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The have also notified users running Intel Apps on Rosetta that Rosetta will be discontinued with the release of MacOS27.

Apple warns well in advance. Intel Macs are indeed not supported in MacOS 27, but Rosetta 2 will still be present. MacOS 28 will be the first version that does not run Intel coded apps any more because Rosetta 2 is discontinued, not MacOS 27.

 

[camner]

In the past I spent too much time trying to determine exactly what was the best computer purchase decision to make at that time or in the near to mid-term future. I was right some of the time and wrong other times, often related to an unexpected announcement from Apple about their new shiny model.

I have since decided to change my approach. When I get to the point where my current setup doesn’t run what I want to do well enough to keep me from cursing it, I say to myself, “Time for a new computer…what’s the best one in my price range I can buy now?” If I end up buying shortly before an expected upgrade announcement, tant pis. Sometimes I lose, sometimes I win,

 

[Paul McFarlane]

I was also surprised to read that LR didn't make use of more than 32G of RAM.

That is incorrect. When Lightroom became 64-bit, the 32GB limit disappeared. Since Silicon uses unified RAM, we suggest going beyond 32GB if you can.

 

[Conrad Chavez]

I was also surprised to read that LR didn't make use of more than 32G of RAM.

It might have been a slight mistranslation of what some including me have posted. Photo applications, such as Photoshop, that can handle a large number of layers, or that people use to make documents with a very large width and height in pixels (many megapixels), can easily blow past 32GB of RAM for an open document. For example, someone creating a print -resolution feature film movie poster combining many images with filters, effects, and Smart Objects. And some keep several of those document open at a time. Those users might get a computer with 96GB or 128GB RAM.

Raw processors such as Lightroom Classic mostly edit a single frame at a time without the kinds of memory-hungry layers Photoshop can pile on. For this reason, Lightroom Classic is less likely to need more than 32GB than Photoshop is. For many Lightroom Classic users, 32–48GB RAM is fine.

However, it’s important to know when Lightroom Classic might need more. One example is merging many images into a large panorama, where Lightroom Classic has to hold all the images in memory as it does the merge. You can sometimes see memory usage spike past 32GB depending on how many images you’re merging. If you do a lot of panorama merges, you might benefit from more RAM.

Also, I seem to notice that the typical memory usage of Lightroom Classic has increased recently. I think it’s tied to Lightroom Classic doing more “layering” than in the past, such as with its masks, which work kind of like Photoshop adjustment layers. Also, Lightroom Classic can now use more generated pixel components that get composited with the original, such as Remove tool spots, Denoise, and the Reflections option of the Remove tool. Those last two keep a pixel copy that’s composited with the original based on the 0–100 Amount you apply for those options.

Although this part won’t apply to the cheese grater Mac Pro, it does apply to the Mac Studio: Apple Silicon Macs use Unified Memory, so the GPU doesn’t have its own dedicated VRAM as conventional Windows PCs do. So although the Mac application itself might not need more than 32GB, any features that use GPU acceleration benefit from having enough GPU memory, which comes out of system memory. So it’s useful to have a little headroom in RAM so that macOS, the applications, and the GPU all get what they need. Even with that, most Apple Silicon Lightroom Classic users might not need more than 48GB unless they edit images from high-megapixel cameras.

Having enough RAM to feed those three parts is slowly becoming important for some Windows systems, as well. The new ARM-based systems for Windows, including the just-announced Nvidia RTX Spark architecture, are more like Apple Silicon, with SoC that uses unified memory. Anyone who picks up one of those will want to think about OS+GPU memory the way Apple Silicon Mac users do.

 

[ellarsee]

Yeah, I've got one pano that's about 500MB that really brings my system to its knees:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/47627884522/
and another that's about 360MB that can bog the system down
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/44056556064/in/album-72157701338274395

They aren't so bad at first, but trying to get the sky to look good takes a bunch of masks, and after a couple of those it gets pretty grim.

I don't get many chances to work on those, but when I do low light dance photography, I really want to denoise the photos, and that takes a while, hence my question about whether a better GPU would help, or if I need the AI chips.

 

[Gnits]

If you are thinking about upgrading the GPU for the tower style Mac..(I am not familiar with the model numbers).. then you need to get real expert advice on what is possible and where you can source the parts and how you handle the drivers required. A camera club member I know upgraded her ‘Cheesegrater’.. and had endless issues with getting drivers for the upgraded GPU to work.. to the extent she removed it and went back to the original setup.

I have a very well specified custom Windows rig. My plan was to upgrade to a Mac Studio or Ultra depending on specs and models available when purchasing. I have breathing space so do not need to act immediately. The choices for me are already difficult.. but as I will need to build a new Thunderbolt disk enclosure for the new machine.. it is likely that I will delay until storage / memory prices get back to something reasonable.. if not.. I will incrementally upgrade my Win rig as needed.

 

[clee01l]

f you are thinking about upgrading the GPU for the tower style Mac..(I am not familiar with the model numbers).. then you need to get real expert advice on what is possible and where you can source the parts and how you handle the drivers required. A camera club member I know upgraded her ‘Cheesegrater’.. and had endless issues with getting drivers for the upgraded GPU to work.. to the extent she removed it and went back to the original setup.

What has been called the "Cheesegrater" by the OP is an older discontinued model of a tower desktop (Mac Pro) that had perforated sides for cooling. (Hence the appropriate name). Unlike other Macs, the inside components were replaceable. You make a very good point. Unless the OP replaces the GPU with a model used in other Mac versions, it is unlikely to be recognized by MacOS.

My suggestion (made in another thread) is to wait until Fall when Apple releases its new hardware models before upgrading to another Silicon Chip that may then be obsolete after September.

 

[Gnits]

That’s the one. I saw first hand. the pain experienced trying to upgrade the GPU and would not like anyone else to repeat the experience.

I was shocked that an expensive device, designed to be upgraded was such a challenge. I do understand that o/s and drivers are a form of perpetual motion.

 

[clee01l]

That’s the one. I saw first hand. the pain experienced trying to upgrade the GPU and would not like anyone else to repeat the experience.

I was shocked that an expensive device, designed to be upgraded was such a challenge. I do understand that o/s and drivers are a form of perpetual motion.

I don't think Apple ever intended their computers to be upgraded by users. This is probably one of the reasons these were discontinued with the advent of Silicon chips.

 

[camner]

Back when I had a “cheese grater” I was able to update the GPU without a problem, but ONLY by buying a Mac-specific GPU (a model that was available when I bought the Mac but I didn’t want to pay for at the time). I had to pay the Apple tax (the same model was available in the “generic” Windows version for a lot less!).