nVidia settings to speed the LR Brush tool on XP

by Sean McCormack

It seems that nVidia users seem to draw the short straw with Lightroom. When Version 1 was released, it took a while to find out that certain performance issues were due to the use of nView. Now with Version 2 it seems there are different performance issues with nVidia.

However Flickr user MarkW Photo has found settings that greatly aid in the speed of the brush tool for Lightroom 2 nVidia users.

“I have finally fixed my slow performance issues with LR2! Today I did a bit of playing around with different performance settings. I’m using LR2 on a HP Pavillion 6258se Laptop. It has an 80GB Hard Drive, 2GB of Ram and the processor is a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion ™ 64 X2 Dual-Core. I had Windows Vista installed months ago but I downgraded back to XP due to Vista issues. First I opened the windows task manager so I could monitor the performance of Windows while using LR2. I noticed when using the develop tasks the performance stayed around 50%. When I used the retouch brush tools the performance still stayed around 50% but the brush tools were still slow. The more I brushed on the image the slower the brush refresh became. This told me that there must be a video performance issue and not necessarily a processor problem.


Here’s how I fixed the problem.

1. I right clicked on the desktop and clicked NVidia Display/Laptop
Dispay.

2. Clicked on the Performance and Quality Settings

3. Under Active profile Click Global Driver Settings.

4. Under Global driver Setting click in the dropdown view advanced settings.

Changed the following settings:

Images setting = High Performance
Force mipmaps = None
Trilinear Optimization = Off
Anisotropic mip filter optimization = Off
Anisotropic sample optimization = Off
Triple Buffer = Off

Without even restarting LR2, the brush tools worked with no lag or delay no matter how much I brushed on the image! They were just as fast as using the sliders in the develop module!

I hope this works other Nvidia users having similar issues!!

Mark “

Mark also mentions seeing an increase in the speed of Large Preview rendering.

As with all settings, your mileage may vary. Remember to note your original settings if you feel the need to go back.