Lightroom 2 and NVidia Performance

I’ve run into some problems with Lightroom being extremely slow when using the new localized adjustment brush – a great new feature in 2.0.  After a few strokes with the brush, it would become very slow and unresponsive.

This morning I looked around on the Adobe forums and found some people saying they had some luck adjusting their NVidia 3D settings.  So I gave it a shot, and so far seems to have cleared things up.  Here’s what I did.

Open up the NVidia Control Panel and set move the Image Settings slider from Quality to Performance.  This will change global performance, so we won’t leave it here.  This is just so we can write down what settings get set when it’s in Performance mode (versus Quality).  Note on the screenshot, the slider should be all the way to the left – apparently I took the screenshot before the UI updated all the way 🙂

Now go to the Manage 3D settings and take note of the settings that it applied.  Here are mine:

Go back to the slider and put it back to Quality.  Then come back to the Manage 3D settings, but this time sleect the Program Settings tab.  Here’s where we’re going to tell the NVidia driver to use special (non-Quality) settings for just Lightroom.exe.  Click Add, locate Lightroom.exe, then set the individual settings to what you took note of earlier:

Click Apply and you’re good to go.  Fire up Lightroom and see if you notice an improvement.  I noticed the adjustment brush felt very responsive, but the overall Lightroom UI seemed a little more sluggish.  This went away when I re-Enabled Triple Buffering (one of the last options in the window above).  So far, it seems to be running much smoother.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but I hope this helps.