Lightroom CC 2015 Crash & Performance Issues – (first release).
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There are a great many folk out there experiencing crash or freeze problems with the new Lightroom CC 2015.
The biggest problem, and the one that has effected me, is random crashing in the Develop Module, and a ‘jittery’ crop rotation tool.
If you have suffered from this then you will most likely have an ‘not too new’ nVidea GPU – or so it would appear.
Lightroom CC 2015 makes use of the graphics GPU acceleration on your computer, and this is ‘turned ON’ by default upon installation of the application.
But it seems that older nVidea chipsets are causing some quite considerable speed reduction problems, to the point where the application can run out of ram and basically crash.
Adobe are supposed to be creating a fix (according to the forums) but you can get around the problem really easily.
Open up Lightroom CC 2015 and go to your Lightroom preferences:
On the preferences panel you’ll see a new tab called ‘Performance’
You will see a checked ‘tick box’ for Use Graphics Processor – UNTICK IT, close the preferences panel and restart Lightroom CC 2015.
I’m on a mid-2009 Mac Pro running 10.10.3 Yosemite and a bog standard (for the day) nVidea Geforce GT120 512Mb graphics card.
Lightroom CC 2015 was slower than Lr5 on this machine, it would crash, the crop tool occasionally looked like it was a ‘motor neurone’ sufferer, and the heal/clone tool was harsh, pixelated and quite slow.
Turning OFF GPU acceleration has seemingly cured all my woes, and now it runs as smoothly as Lightroom 5 did but with the Photomerge options and other benefits of Lightroom CC 2015.
On that same performance tab there is a ‘system info’ button you can press that’ll give you the specifications of your machine and Lightroom installation:
The word ‘Passed’ next to the Open GL support means nothing, and if you you click the ‘Learn More’ link on the performance tab of Lightroom preferences it’ll take you to THIS PAGE on the Adobe support website.
On that page you will see this:
Now this explains A LOT!
Running a standard (sub 2K) 24″ monitor with sub 1Gb of VRAM, even with updated driver support for Open GL 3.3, means you are running at a resolution of 1920 pixels long edge and in effect you will not really benefit from Lightroom CC 2015 GPU acceleration in the first place.
I’m also running Lightroom CC 2015 on a mid 2011 27″ non-retina iMac with a horizontal resolution of 2560 pixels and an ATI Radion HD 6770M 512Mb graphics chipset. This machine hasn’t crashed as such, but is certainly better run with the GPU acceleration turned OFF too.
Here is a very rough test you can do:
- Open a FULL RESOLUTION image in the Develop module.
- Pick up the Heal/Clone tool and set it to Heal with the opacity & feather controls to 100%
- Paint a random stroke on the image, and while painting, look carefully at the white edges of the stroke – are they smooth and feathered, or harsh and slightly granular?
- If they are the latter the go and turn OFF GPU acceleration and repeat the process – you will see the edges of the stroke look much better.
Click to view LARGER
So, think of it this way; Adobe have put a facility into Lightroom 6/CC 2015 that makes use of very latest up to date computer graphics systems AND it’s ‘active’ by default.
If you run a new iMac 27″ Retina then you are running 5120 pixels on the long edge – that’s 5K graphics, and the new GPU acceleration will help you.
If your system fails to meet the operating criteria then having the acceleration active will cause you problems. The severity of the problems you experience will be proportional to how ‘out of date’ your graphics are; so TURN IT OFF !
I can’t speak about installations of Lightroom CC 2015 under the Windows operating systems, but looking at the forums it seems that the same sort of problems exist for PC users.
A friend called this morning saying that the default installation ran smoothly and at warp-speed on his new retina macbook, but was noticeably slower than Lightroom 5 on his desktop PC – same problem, same fix.
Crash and slow-down problems with Lightroom CC 2015 are not OS problems – they are GPU VRAM/RAM problems, so don’t waste your time defraging hard drives and running system ‘junk checks’ if Lightroom 5 ran well.
Lightroom CC 2015 Launch Hang Problem?
If you are experiencing launch hang, splash screen hang or crashing of the application on launch then GO HERE where you’ll see the instructions in the image above.
Kyle Bailey kindly sent me a solution/fix for a windows crash fix if you literally can’t uncheck the graphics acceleration check box:
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Andrew, but I couldn’t untick the graphics processor box –Lightroom would crash when I tried. I just spent a couple hours with tech support and thought I’d share our solution:
Close LR first. Open device manager, double click on display adapters, right-click your graphics card (mine was AMD Radeon), choose install drivers, browse system, pick from list. Make NOTE of which is currently active, then change it to standard VGA. It may prompt you to reboot, but don’t do it.
This will make the screen look crazy, but don’t worry! Now, open LR, untick the graphics box, and close LR.
Finally, go back into device manager and change it back to the original driver and viola. Next time you start LR, the box will remain unticked.
Cheers for that Kyle.
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