Having this conversation on DPReview.com and I thought it would be a useful FYI for folks here:
John Bean was experiencing performance problems with Lightroom 1.0 on his PC systems and found a tidbit from the Adobe forums that explains a lot of it ... Lightroom is heavily optimized to use SSE2 capable processors. Since I didn't know what that meant, I looked it up and found a useful description of SSE2 on wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2 The notional equivalent of SSE2 capability on Apple systems first surfaced on the PowerPC G4 cpu models (AltiVec) and was massively upgraded/enhanced on the PowerPC G5s. Apple's Intel-based CPUs all have SSE2 capability. This explains to me why Lightroom has more performance problems on Windows systems compared to Mac OS X and answers why some have found the beta release near to unusable when my experience, all on Apple systems, was very positive regards to performance. John goes on to say "...Any other AMD users be aware that the earliest AMD CPUs to have SSE2 are the Athlon 64s. Anything earlier - forget it unless you only have tiny image collections or a massive amounts of patience. PS: giving the system more resources definitely helps, but not enough to be workable with image libraries over about 10k. ..." --- Lightroom is also very disk intensive: tt pushes a lot of data back and forth to the disk in operation ... a fast disk and a lot of free space to work with help performance enormously. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
