Processing burden of Adobe AI denoise

[DanK]

Today I tried an experiment: I told Lightroom to apply the new AI denoise to a stack of 28 photos as a batch. It was very slow, of course, but about halfway through I noticed a very unusual and loud fan noise coming from my computer. I thought the fan was failing, but I simply shut it down and rebooted, and it's been fine since. I think what happened is that the processing burden was so high that the processor began to overheat, and the computer had to crank up the fan to a level I had never heard before.

[Manfred M]

Your computer is doing what it is supposed to. The software is processor intensive, which increases the amount of heat generated, so the cooling fan turns faster to move more air to remove that heat.

I have exactly the same thing happen with my computers.

If the cooler cannot keep up, the computer is supposed to reduce voltage which will lower the clock speed of the processor. This is better than having your CPU burn out. I had a CPU fan fail once and the computer ran so slowly, I knew something had to have gone wrong. I installed a new fan and everything went back to normal.

[DanK]

I understand. However, I've never had other software cause this, even statistical software. It's an indication of just how large the computing load is with that software.

In this case, it's possible that it's the GPU rather than (or in addition to) the CPU, but it doesn't really matter. I decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and I'm not going to try to use it with stacks of that size in the future.