By way of an expansion upon yesterdays histrionics, I took it upon myself to offer some affirmation of the statistics by repeating the tests on an alternate platform. Said machine comprised:
Intel Core i7 940 @ 2.93GHz
6GB Triple Channel DDR3 @ 1600MHz
As previously, a single disk is in use, and photographs are imported using the "Add" option, so as to minimise the impact of disk IO on the tests.
If we compare first the relative performance of Lightroom 2.4 and 3 Beta (both 64bit builds), the pronounced inferior performance of 3 across the board is plain to see:
Thus affirming the statistics from yesterday:
Finally, it would appear that hyperthreading makes little or no difference. Multi thread support is an architectural consideration that cannot realistically be introduced outside of the formative stages of a project. Since Lightroom 3.0 is apparently not a green field development, we would not expect relative performance with HT on or off to differ in 3 where it did not in 2.
As regards the general performance, fair enough - it's a beta. I know very well myself that speed is a key concern at the beginning and end of the software life cycle, in terms of architectural decisions and then optimisation respectively. If Lightroom is going to perform poorly at any stage of its production, the time is now - but even so the difference is pronounced. Any judgement is premature because the specific nature of this build is not clear, but given that performance is one of the primary concerns for any user of a digital darkroom, we shall be keeping a very close eye on things as future builds become available.
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