jhapeman
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On
|
dclark wrote:
You can get some good guidance on how to configure a LR PC at the Puget Systems web site. Here is a link to an article about LR, Hardware Recommendations for Adobe Lightroom Classic. Puget Systems sells PC workstations and they publish a lot of benchmark results for a variety of applications. I use their web site to learn more about how to optimally configure a PC, but I build my own for considerably less than they charge, and continuously upgrade as new stuff is introduced. @jhapeman@ has a $15,000 PC that looks to have been sub-optimally configured for LR. For that kind of money I can build multiple PC's with good LR performance.
Puget Systems publishes their benchmarking software, but unfortunately it does not work for Mac's. It would be interesting to see some real benchmark data. Since Puget Systems only sells PC systems they have little or no incentive to extend their benchmarks to Mac's. The GeekBench software is interesting but not specific to applications like LR. It seems to be more useful for component testing.
...Show more →
Actually it wasn't "sub-optimally configured for LR;" it was optimally configured for 3D rendering. That said, the same huge horsepower it had in the GPU and CPU *should* have given it in an edge in most of the LR and PS tests. Yes, one could get similar performance for less money. However, we were also talking benchmarks and my data was showing that synthetic benchmarks implied that the PC should have crushed the Mac Studio and yet it did not.
This also applies to the Mac Studio BTW; there's not necessarily a need to buy the fully-loaded $6000 version; the base Ultra will get you 95% of the performance for 33% less money. So really you can get top of the line performance for $4000. To get a PC with similar performance you will end up spending almost exactly the same amount, and upgradeability in most PCs is also pretty limited these days; most will only support a max of 128GB of RAM, there are typically only a couple of internal PCIe slots, one of which will be used by your graphics card, and if you like super fast TB peripherals, you have to buy one of the very few top of the line boards like the ASUS ProArt that have TB capabilities. For someone shooting that many photos, fast external TB storage has to be one of the most important priorities; I shoot a similar number of photos and it certainly is for me.
Things to keep in mind are that there are just huge performance advantages to the memory being all pooled. For one, a the Ultra version of the M1 you get 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. For GPU tasks that's a HUGE advantage. Even PCIe 5.0 x16 caps at 128GB/s; for tasks that are GPU intensive they have to round-robin back and forth to the CPU and that 6.25x speed difference is very noticeable in real-world use.
This isn't just fanboying or empty comparisons; for my work I have employees who have to use Windows PCs, and very powerful ones at that. Before the Studio was released, I was getting pretty frustrated with the wait for an update in the MacPro space and how slow some of the tasks in LR ran, so I did a lot of extensive testing and configuration of PCs to compare. I'm completely capable of building a high-end PC and have been doing so since 1993, so I know how to squeeze out the best performance for a dollar. What I found is that it was a false economy on the PC side; to get the features I wanted to match a Mac I had to spend nearly the same amount all for a machine that was bigger, louder (a lot, even with "quiet" fans), hotter and quite frankly just uglier.  Then to top it all off, Windows just remains Windows. The new UI is frankly garbage, with some stuff in a new design, and other settings buried in old menus and old UI styles, making changes much more frustrating than needed. In daily use, we have much more problems with the one Windows machine we run LR on than the Mac; we have to quit Lightroom at least once a day as it gets a little flaky, and the computer itself behaves better if you reboot it daily. Meanwhile, I will leave my Macs running without a reboot for months on end.
I made a career for 20 years in the Windows world, and to be honest, I don't hate it like many Mac users do, but it is really hard to go back to using it when the user experience is so inelegant and clunky in comparison. I "daily drove" the PC for a while when I was doing testing thinking I could maybe make a switch back. I figured it wouldn't matter since I spend so much time in LR anyway, and its all but identical on both platforms...but the reality is that on the Mac everything else just was so seamless I didn't notice it, but it was annoying on a PC. The complete integration of my Mail, favorites in browser, cut and paste between Mac and iPhone, Airdrop files, etc. made my overall workflow and daily use experience so much better. At the end of the day from a work perspective having the OS and daily tasks just get out of my way and better yet streamline my workflow was a big advance on the Mac side.
BTW, I'm very intrigued to see what the new M2 Max Mac Mini can do. I suspect the loaded version--which you can build out for $2299--will have some serious performance for things like LR and Photoshop, and in a tiny silent package. One last thing, the OP mentions monitors. Personally having used 5K retina displays since 2014 and the 6K Pro Display XDR since 2019, I can't stand going back down to only 4K resolution. The BenQ we have for the PC is a great display but just not in the same league a real 5K/6K display. For photo editing of high-megapixel camera images that monitor resolution is very useful IMO.
|
