Better software… Indeed, export takes some time, lens distortion and certainly prime noise reduction are the ones that seem to eat up resources. Processing images in DPL sucks up all available resources (check DPL advanced settings for number of cpus involved in processing*) as far as I can seen from Intel’s Power Gadget:
Other than that, more cpus might help, but only dxo can tell you how many cpus their software can manage. And last but not least, turn off unneccessary processes with notable cpu consumption for the last drops on a hot stone.
this setting does not make a big difference: Processing 60 images (no correction) took 3’3’’ set on 4 images while the same processing took 3’48’’ when set on 2 images.
Nothing will really speed up DxO PhotoLab at this point, other than hardware acceleration. More of the heavy image processing load should be carried by the GPU. Some of the operations should be carried out on proxies rather than the full image (i.e. if 2500 x 1800 pixels are visible on the screen that’s how much should be calculated even at the risk of some of the border pixels not looking identical to how they’d look in the full image (due to invisible neighbours). The downside here is that dragging the image would be slower.
If you want to more responsive sliders right now:
enable Noise Reduction (either Fast which is excellent in its own right, leaving a bit of film grain or Prime which makes all the noise go away but can sometimes look a little bit contrived) at the very end when you are finished all the colour correction and cropping.
only enable Lens Correction at the very end (it’s also processor intensive).
The way I work is to disable everything by default and only enable what I need except for Noise Reduction and Lens Correction which I’ll add at the very end. This workflow makes DxO PhotoLab sliders considerably more responsive and makes preview appear almost immediately. In comparison to 4 to 8 second waits with Noise Reduction and Lens Correction enabled.
PS. There’s nothing wrong with my hardware, thanks for asking. 12 processors, SSD, 128 GB of RAM. I’m using 4K monitors and a 5DS R.