# Apple's OS X El Capitan To Improve Adobe CC Performance



## Canon Rumors Guy (Jun 9, 2015)

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Apple announced the next version of OS X yesterday at its Worldwide Developers Conference. The next version of the OS will be called El Capitan and it’ll be available sometime in the fall.</p>
<p>Of note for photographers in the update will be the inclusion of Apple’s Metal framework which will greatly improve graphics performance, as much as 40x more efficient when rendering than OpenGL. Keep in mind this is just a raw number, and we’re not going to see a 40x boost in performance across the board.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://petapixel.com/2015/06/08/apple-os-x-el-capitan-to-improve-the-performance-of-adobe-cc-apps/" target="_blank">PetaPixel</a>, Adobe has said that they’ve seen an 8x improvement in rendering for After Effects, which sounds very promising. It’s unknown at the moment how much improvement we’ll see from Photoshop or Lightroom, but we do know that Adobe will support Metal in all of its CC applications this fall.</p>
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## wopbv4 (Jun 9, 2015)

Let's hope that they will finally support 10 bit/color channel (30 bit).
Windows has been supporting this for several years and Apple has been seriously lagging in this respect


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## huck222 (Jun 9, 2015)

didn't Adobe talk about suuuper speed boosts with LR 6? Well, for the most users i know, it just got slower! On my machine at least, it's slower (MB Pro Early 2011). So till i see the improvement i dont dare to hope...


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## bsbeamer (Jun 9, 2015)

How about Adobe starts by actually releasing their updates to CC subscribers already? Been waiting since pre-NAB for updates to Premiere and AE... this HOPEFULLY will not stall those updates any further!


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## jeffa4444 (Jun 9, 2015)

Would agree that the switch to LR6 from LR5 my latest version iMac runs slower openning up LR6 and the rendering of changes is sometimes slower also. 
That said as an Apple fanboy Photos is about the worst piece of software Apple have ever produced they basically abandonned serious photographers which definately pushed me down the road of Photoshop CC / Lightroom CC both of which Im still learning how to use like a baby!


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## Sith Zombie (Jun 9, 2015)

jeffa4444 said:


> That said as an Apple fanboy Photos is about the worst piece of software Apple have ever produced they basically abandonned serious photographers which definately pushed me down the road of Photoshop CC / Lightroom CC both of which Im still learning how to use like a baby!


Glad i'm not the only one!


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Jun 9, 2015)

I found LR CC (2015) was running slower for some functions and it had me frustrated. Then I discovered that it or I had created the copy of my LR 5 catalog on my spinning hard drive and not on my SSD like LR5.

I moved the catalog to the SSD, and the speed went back up to normal.


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## setterguy (Jun 9, 2015)

Apple has seriously disappointed serious amateurs such as myself with "Photos" which isn't even a ghost of Aperture. I won't update to LR6/CC until I can get a direct computer based download and when they figure out what the drag is on the processing power of existing Macs. Adobe as usual over promises and grossly under delivers; especially with regard to LR.


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## yorgasor (Jun 9, 2015)

I have a dream that someday, I won't have to restart lightroom every hour just to keep it from bogging down and being basically unusable.


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## Ryan_ (Jun 9, 2015)

Just a heads up in case those complaining of Lightroom slowness don't already know. I turned off the graphics card acceleration or whatever its called in LR preferences and my LR6 is running identically to LR5 now (which is not a complaint - I'm ok with the speed for the most part). Before doing that, it was suuuupppeeerrr slllooowww and laggy.


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## andrewflo (Jun 9, 2015)

huck222 said:


> didn't Adobe talk about suuuper speed boosts with LR 6? Well, for the most users i know, it just got slower! On my machine at least, it's slower (MB Pro Early 2011). So till i see the improvement i dont dare to hope...



I haven't run scientific benchmarks, but I find LR6 to feel a little more sluggish as well (MBP Retina 2013, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Nvidia 750m).

Launch feels like it takes 2-3 longer, and the most annoying thing for me is pressing the "\" key to toggle Before/After views in the Develop module now causes the image to disappear for about .5 seconds as it re-renders between the toggle states. It's near instantaneous with GPU acceleration disabled... =(


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## syder (Jun 9, 2015)

andrewflo said:


> huck222 said:
> 
> 
> > didn't Adobe talk about suuuper speed boosts with LR 6? Well, for the most users i know, it just got slower! On my machine at least, it's slower (MB Pro Early 2011). So till i see the improvement i dont dare to hope...
> ...



But you're using a two year old, mid-range, mobile graphics card (ie one with very little power in comparison to a new desktop graphics card). 

According to videobenchmark.net the 750m is the 179th fastest videocard with a benchmark score of 1382 (higher is better), as opposed to a current desktop card like the 970 gtx which gets a score of 8631. Current high end cards score over 10k, and often are used in multi-card configurations.

My guess would be that GPU acceleration in LR6 requires a better graphics card than is found in your laptop.


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## twagn (Jun 9, 2015)

I'm on a Mac Book Pro 2014 (LR6CC) and honestly can't tell much difference if I check the "use graphics processor" or not. The speed of Lightroom 6 has not been an issue with me anyway. Any improvements the OS X upgrade would provide are welcome


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## andrewflo (Jun 9, 2015)

syder said:


> andrewflo said:
> 
> 
> > huck222 said:
> ...



You're absolutely right. Testing GPU acceleration on a laptop mobile GPU isn't exactly the tell-all for LR6's GPU performance.

Maybe this is being needy... but if I can play modern FPS games on my MacBook at 60fps... I'd love be able to toggle Before/After in LR without the image disappearing for half a second


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## erjlphoto (Jun 10, 2015)

I hope they do something about the lousy font in Yosemite.
Also hope they don't dumb down again to make it more closely
resemble IOS. Hope iPhoto stays around for another round in OSX


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## Zv (Jun 10, 2015)

Still a few bugs with LR6. Back up takes longer now and makes my screen go black for 30s. Also I have lost the Autoplay feature that lets you import directly to Lightroom when you plug a card in (I think it's called a handle). The handle is now a broken link for LR 3.0?? What?? Anyone know how to fix that? Lightroom 3 or any other prev version was uninstalled years ago. 

Tut tut Adobe. What kinda game are you playing. These are not the performance enhancements we were looking for!


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## neuroanatomist (Jun 10, 2015)

Zv said:


> Tut tut Adobe. What kinda game are you playing. These are not the performance enhancements we were looking for!



Adobeware is bloated and complex. Apple's Photos takes the opposite approach – a simple, elegant app. Who needs features, anyway?


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## endiendo (Jun 12, 2015)

I have a Core i7 3770 (3.4 Ghz), 32 Gb ssd-cache, 16 Gb ram, and a GTX970.
Lightroom 6 works "instant", any change in development tool takes less than 1 seconds.. it is very fast...


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## wopbv4 (Jul 11, 2015)

Just installed el capitan beta on my macbook pro (late 2014).
I only notice a slight improvement in performance in Photoshop CC, but I have not yet tried any heavy processing.

Biggest issue that I have is that it is still 8bit/color channel (24 bit). I am very annoyed, I hoped that OSX El Capitan would finally support 10 bit/color, but it is not so


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## iKenndac (Jul 11, 2015)

The title of the thread is _slightly_ misleading. 

El Capital contains a new graphics stack that improves graphics performance over the older OpenGL stack. However, applications need to be updated to use the new stack. 

So, your Lightroom won't magically get faster with El Capitan. Adobe will need to update it to support the new technology.

What's worrying me is that an Adobe guy came onstage at the keynote and promised to improve a bunch of their apps… but no mention of Lightroom. He did say Photoshop, but given Lightroom's track record I'm not entirely sure when we'll see support for the new technology, if ever. I'll be very happy to be wrong.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Jul 11, 2015)

iKenndac said:


> The title of the thread is _slightly_ misleading.
> 
> El Capital contains a new graphics stack that improves graphics performance over the older OpenGL stack. However, applications need to be updated to use the new stack.
> 
> ...



Since Photoshop and Lightroom use the same processing engine, they will both benefit unless Adobe deliberately blocks it in LR CC, which is unlikely. Its not going into LR 6 though.


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## pwp (Jul 12, 2015)

As someone who is platform agnostic happily running both Macs & PC's, this will be welcome news if it's true. However I do most of my heavy lifting on grunty, rubber burning PC's (PremierePro, big Lightroom batches etc...) so am hoping for a similar efficiency boost from Windows 10 when it ships. Hopefully Adobe and Microsoft have been talking to each other. 

-pw


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## LDS (Jul 12, 2015)

pwp said:


> etc...) so am hoping for a similar efficiency boost from Windows 10 when it ships.



Metal is the Apple equivalent of Windows DirectX. Like DirectX, but unlike OpenGL, it's not cross-platform. That means Adobe to support them will need two separate implementations, and I bet it will first support the Apple one, and maybe later Windows.

Windows 10 will introduce a new version of DirectX allowing a more direct access to the GPU (although more complex to use) and enhanced performance, but as far as I know, it won't be available for 7 and 8.x, and thereby its support will depend on how fast Windows 10 will reach a large enough user base (before 7 becomes unsupported in 2020...)


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