ACR 7.0 slowness, any tweaks?

[Redcrown]

I'm suffering a bit with the new ACR 7.0 under CS6 being quite a bit slower than CS5 version on my system. Anybody know if there are performance tweaking steps unique to CS6? I've played with the usual suspects, but nothing seems to make a difference.

I started noticing slow conversions to Pshop, so much slower that a progress bar appears. Some quick testing showed that conversion time is accumulative depending on how many and what kind of adjustments are made. The new "2012" tone controls and the new CA removal tool seem to be the main "turtles".

For example, I took a batch of 10 raw files and fully loaded them with adjustments. White Balance, Exposure, contrast, clarity, sat, vibrance, tone (highlight recovery, shadow/fill, blacks), noise reduction, sharpening, lens correction, CA removal. Then I opened all 10 in ACR and saved as 8 bit tifs. CS5 did it in 48 seconds, CS6 took 75 seconds - 56% longer.

My other pain is in viewing and panning at 100%. I like to review raws by opening in ACR from Bridge, viewing 100% and panning around to check focus and sharpness. In CS5, getting to 100% view is almost instant, and panning is very responsive. Just a little "jerkiness". In CS6/ACR7, it takes 1 to 2 seconds to get to 100% view. Panning is much more jerky. Small pan movements are not bad, but larger pans often "freeze" for 2 to 3 seconds, then catch up.

My system in Win7 64bit, with an I5 quad processor and beacoup memory. Graphis card is an Nvidia 9500, which is listed as compatible by Adobe.

[Schewe]

I've played with the usual suspects, but nothing seems to make a difference.

Like what?

You don't mention your ram, you don't mention your display size (which impact preview updates) and you haven't mention the things you've tried. Kinda hard for us to guess what to tell you.

[Redcrown]

Thanks, Jeff.

Display size is 1900 by 1200.
8GB ram, with nothing running but Bridge/ACR I never go over 35% ram usage.

Under Camera Raw Preferences I've run the cache up to 3gb. I use DNG, but see no difference with CR2 files and sidecars. I've changed the "Apply Sharpening" between "All" and "Preview" with no difference. The other Camera Raw Preferences don't seem relevant to conversion, zooming, or panning.

I don't see any Bridge Preferences that seem relevant to ACR performance, and I'm not sure if any Bridge or Photoshop preferences impact ACR. But that's why I asked. My Bridge cache is on a secondary hard drive, and is huge. I've tried setting it to a virgin folder for testing (empty cache), with no change in ACR performance.

My video card only has 512mb ram. I'm getting curious about the "Mercury Graphics Engine" aspect of CS6, and if more video card ram is beneficial. But nothing I've read says that ACR is using the GPU.

Would be helpful to me if others could check on their systems to see if they get similar results.

Does your CS6/ACR7 take 50% longer to convert identical raw files IF you invoke tone controls, noise reduction, and CA removal?

Does your ACR7 take longer to zoom from the initial "fit image" to 100% preview? If you pan around a 100% preview to you see occassional lags.

I'm seeing another difference with the ACR adjustment brush (which I hardly ever use). My CS6/ACR7 adjustment brush if often "jerky" and lags far behind the paint strokes. I'm starting to think my issue is not with the actual internal calculations, but with the display driver.

[Schewe]

Display size is 1900 by 1200.
8GB ram, with nothing running but Bridge/ACR I never go over 35% ram usage.

So, you are opening ACR hosted by Bridge vs. Photoshop? Is there a good reason for that?

I can't really compare my system to yours...I have a Mac OS X 10.6.8 with 32 gigs of ram. So, testing various processing times prolly won't help you. I do tend to run ACR 7.1 with less than a full screen 30" display but when you add noise reduction plus PV 2012 plus local adjustments plus lens corrections plus spot healing, things can be pretty slow...

I tend to turn off the lens correction and noise/sharpening and local corrections when working on basic adjustments (which I tend to do first).

And no, I've not tested export processing speeds...sorry, not particularly interested into doing so at this time...got other stuff to do now. Sorry...