Originally posted by Adam Even if LR doesn't use hardware acceleration much, I think not having a graphics card will still hurt the app's overall performance.
It won't hurt, but it won't help either.
From Adobe's "
Optimize Performance" article:
Lightroom requires a video card that can run the monitor at its native resolution. Built-in, default cards that ship with most desktop or laptop systems typically suffice for Lightroom.
I've used LR extensively on different hardware and the problems are inefficient programming and bugs, not lacking graphics card performance.
If you reduce LR's window size, the Develop module adjustments will become rather fluid. Enlarge the window, or go full size, and the adjustment updates become choppier. My graphics cards can all display full screen images at 30Hz or more. It's the image generation that is the problem.
LR does not use the GPU to speed up anything.
Originally posted by reeftool With less memory, Lightroom will use your more of your hard drive for a scratch disk space and that will slow the program down to a crawl, especially if you have only one hard drive that doesn't have a lot of free space on it.
In my experience, LR can become really slow without any disc activity going on whatsoever. If paging were always the problem, one would be able to tell from the hard disc trashing away.
You are right, paging (not only in terms of main memory but also in terms of the infamous "ACR scratch file") can be a problem, but in my experience most of the time paging is not the source of slowness.