Hi Gunther,
if you were looking for the best hardware to give the best performance for LRT and Lightroom what should we be looking for. CPU performance GPU performance or what ? I was looking at the new Macbook Pro with M2 Pro and M2 Max or the Mac Mini with M2 Pro and just wasn't sure what options that I can choose would give the best LRT performance. I know any will be good but just wanted to understand what the best variables were ?

Thanks.

This post was last modified: 2023-01-30, 21:17 by Gunther.

We already had this many times, use the search feature for "LRTimelapse Hardware" or similar.

Bottomline: the GPU is not so important, LRTimelapse (and Lightroom Classic) will mostly take profit of multiple CPU cores because those allow to parallelize tasks like preview generation etc, export etc.

Go for a Computer with as many cores as you can afford, a fast SSD (you can add additional internal or external SSDs for the timelapse sequences, this would be ideal). 32 GB of Memory should be plenty if you don't intend to use lots of other applications beides LRT and LrC in parallel.

The M1/M2 macs are nice and fast with LRTimelapse. I just heard that the smalles M2 mini with 256 GB Ram has a very slow internal SSD which kind of cripples it. Go for the 512 GB variant here. But in terms of differences between those Mac boxes, you should do some individual research, I'm not an expert for this.

Thanks, I have an M1 Max Macbook Pro 16" and it's lightning fast, but I may have an option to upgrade so just making sure I'm ready :-)

I can add that it seems LR is slowed down when enabling GPU for export with a fast CPU. Just check on your system which is the fastest option. GPU-support will be important for video editing and some plugins like NeatVideo are accelerated a lot but as Gunther said - no need for an powerful GPU just for LRT und LR.