AI functionality in Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz, DxO, or ON1, such as denoising, sharpening, filtering, filling, etc., already makes heavy use of graphics cards today. Adobe announced that starting later this year, some of their software, for instance Camera Raw, won’t even make all features available unless the system has a graphics card. Not trying to scare anyone with this, but it more and more looks like GPUs are becoming a necessity for serious photo editing, let alone for video work.

In light of this, I just upgraded my Windows system with a GPU. Not wanting to buy a new PC, I added an external graphics card to my notebook, which turned out to be easier than I expected.

Today, I ran a bunch of benchmarks using several photo editors with OM-1 and Canon R5 images. While investigating options, I’d seen a number of videos essentially saying “Don’t add a GPU – they’re not worth it”, so I was fairly apprehensive initially – and was pleased to find that adding the card made a HUGE difference: functions such as sharpening with Topaz, or reducing noise with DxO of Lightroom, now run at least five times, and sometimes more than 12 times, faster.

In short, I recommend taking a look at this route or at adding a GPU card to an existing PC. Should you be interested in details on my setup and benchmarking results, you can find those on my website at https://thisbeautifulplanet.de/will-a-graphics-card-speed-up-my-editing.

Hope this is helpful. [Note: I make no money with any of this, and my site has as little visitor tracking as WordPress lets you get away with. ]