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New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

jhapeman
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

OK, my new 16" M3 Max MacBook Pro arrived yesterday and I got it all set up by last evening and then ran some of my usual tests. I had to redo the tests for the Adobe AI DeNoise because after Lightroom 13.0 was released I discovered that while the DNG files it creates are smaller, its also slower by almost 20%--no doubt that time is being used to compress the DNG file.

I got the beefiest M3 Max as I like doing processing on the road when I'm traveling, and when I'm at home away from the Mac Studio Ultra in my office, I want it to be fast too. And fast it is...in fact, for many tasks it equals the desktop version of the Nvidia RTX 4080 and barely lags behind the RTX 4090. Seeing this I think the Ultra version of the M3 will handily outperform the 4090, which is a pretty stunning achievement for a company that's just making their first desktop GPUs.

Without further ado, here's the key graphs to look at. I'm processing DeNoise on a standard A7RIV file someone shared earlier this year on the Lightroom Queen forums, and for all of the machines rendering previews and jpeg exporting the exact same batch of 1465 Sony A1 raw files.

Render 1465 Full-sized Previews

Export 1465 Full-sized jpegs

Process Sony A7RIV in Adobe LR 13.0.1 AI DeNoise

Nov 08, 2023 at 04:30 PM

eyal
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

Challenge accepted! Curious how my 14" M3 Max 48gb RAM stacks up...

My plan was to compare importing with about 4,000 images which I typically take on a Friday Night football game on this vs the prior 14" M1 Pro 16gb RAM but happy to try the above with mine if throw files up somewhere.

Nov 08, 2023 at 04:42 PM

WillR
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

Can you link to the file you're using for the denoise test? I just received an M3 Pro Macbook (the 36 Gbyte variant). It still doing indexing and Time Machine backups, but once that's done I could try the Denoise test and see how the Pro version of the M3 compares to the Max

-Will

Nov 08, 2023 at 05:15 PM

hoodlum90
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

Nov 08, 2023 at 06:05 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

WillR wrote:
Can you link to the file you're using for the denoise test? I just received an M3 Pro Macbook (the 36 Gbyte variant). It still doing indexing and Time Machine backups, but once that's done I could try the Denoise test and see how the Pro version of the M3 compares to the Max

-Will

The raw file I've been using is here:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/my-recent-gpu-experience-gigabyte-nvidia-rtx-4070-ti-12gb.47572/#post-1315509

I only use that one because I can compare to other results posted there, although now with the LRC 13.x updates the old numbers are no longer usable.

Nov 08, 2023 at 06:07 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

eyal wrote:
Challenge accepted! Curious how my 14" M3 Max 48gb RAM stacks up...

My plan was to compare importing with about 4,000 images which I typically take on a Friday Night football game on this vs the prior 14" M1 Pro 16gb RAM but happy to try the above with mine if throw files up somewhere.

Oh boy the folder of images is pretty big, over 90GB. The DeNoise file is linked below if you want to grab that. If you really want to download 90GB of bird photos, let me know and I can see if I have enough space on DropBox.

Nov 08, 2023 at 06:15 PM

eyal
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

jhapeman wrote:
Oh boy the folder of images is pretty big, over 90GB. The DeNoise file is linked below if you want to grab that. If you really want to download 90GB of bird photos, let me know and I can see if I have enough space on DropBox.

I have an a1 as well so should be similar if shooting same format - RAW lossless compressed or RAW uncompressed?
And what steps are you doing in LRc?

I wasn't sure with the Enhance - Denoise link if he is counting from when he hits Enhance or after waiting for LRc to do its calculations then hit Enter or whatever in dialog box until image shows

I planned a better test of running denoise on all images in a certain ISO range and averaging the results

Nov 08, 2023 at 06:28 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

eyal wrote:
I have an a1 as well so should be similar if shooting same format - RAW lossless compressed or RAW uncompressed?
And what steps are you doing in LRc?

I wasn't sure with the Enhance - Denoise link if he is counting from when he hits Enhance or after waiting for LRc to do its calculations then hit Enter or whatever in dialog box until image shows

I planned a better test of running denoise on all images in a certain ISO range and averaging the results

They are lossless compressed raws, I think any batch would be similar.

On the Denoise, the time measured is after the dialogue box pops up and you hit "Enhance." That said, a good set of say 30 files would a better averaged test. One of use can set up a download for that?

Nov 08, 2023 at 07:03 PM

Oscarsmadness
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

wheeeeeeee that is impressive!

Nov 08, 2023 at 08:43 PM

WillR
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

jhapeman wrote:
The raw file I've been using is here:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/my-recent-gpu-experience-gigabyte-nvidia-rtx-4070-ti-12gb.47572/#post-1315509

I only use that one because I can compare to other results posted there, although now with the LRC 13.x updates the old numbers are no longer usable.

On my M3 Pro Macbook with 36 Gbytes, Lightroom 13.01 takes 57 seconds to denoise that A7riv raw. So a little more than twice as long as the M3 Max, and just about exactly twice as long as the M2 Max. I didn't see a stat for this on the M2 Pro, so I don't know what the generational improvement is.

Watching activity monitor as denoise works, almost all the work seems to be done by the GPUs until the very end when there is a bunch of cpu activity (perhaps doing the DNG compression?)

-Will

Edited on Nov 08, 2023 at 09:29 PM · View previous versions

Nov 08, 2023 at 09:15 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

WillR wrote:
On my M3 Pro Macbook with 36 Gbytes, Lightroom 13.01 takes 57 seconds to denoise that A7riv raw. So a little more than twice as long as the M3 Max, and just about exactly twice as long as the M2 Max. I didn't see a stat for this on the M2 Pro, so I don't know what the generational improvement is.

-Will

How many CPU and GPU cores does yours have? I just realized that my wife has a 14" M2 Pro 10-core CPU/16-core GPU with 16GB of RAM that I got for her this summer after I last ran these tests. I will have to get Lightroom on there and do the same tests to see.

Nov 08, 2023 at 09:27 PM

WillR
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

12 cpus and 18 gpus
I think the denoise execution time is inversely proportional to the number of gpus based on what I see in activity monitor
-Will

Nov 08, 2023 at 09:32 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

WillR wrote:
12 cpus and 18 gpus
I think the denoise execution time is inversely proportional to the number of gpus based on what I see in activity monitor
-Will

That is correct, it scales quite linearly. It would be nice to know what Apple is going to fix the bug that prevents Adobe from utilizing the Apple neural engines, as according to Adobe it is significantly faster when using those.

Nov 08, 2023 at 10:04 PM

eyal
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

Not sure how you made those awesome graphs but here is a quick experiment I just did.

Setup: Macbook Pros disconnected from external monitors, RAID, etc and both rebooted and waited 5 minutes after start

Comparisons:
14" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip (CPU 8P/2E; GPU 16) and 16gb RAM [M1P]
14" MacBook Pro with M3 Max chip (CPU 12P/4E; GPU 40) and 48gb RAM [M3M]

Lightroom Classic - importing from Pergear 520gb CF-E type A using Pergear CFE reader

Lightroom time to open - M3M 5 sec; M1P 10 sec (might have mistimed this one)
Time from Inserting CFE card into reader until LRc opened the Import Dialog box - M3M 37 sec; M1P 48 sec
Import dialogue fully loaded all 6,205 images on card (ie ready to click Import button) - M3M: 45 sec; M1P 48 sec

Time to import 1,192 Raw Compressed a1 images - M3M 1:32; M1P 1:39
Build Standard Previews for 1,192 Raw Compressed a1 images (ie total import time) - M3M 2:07; M1P 4:20
Fan turned on for M3M at 50 sec; for M1P at 2:30

Time to Export 100 full resolution JPGs from Raw Compressed a1 images - M3M 1:10; M1P 3:15
Fan turned on for M3M at 45 sec; for M1P at 3:00

Time to run Enhance-Denoise on 30 Raw Compressed a1 images at ISO 10,000
Enhance dialogue fully opened with preview - M3M 6.86 sec; M1P 9.97 sec
Time to create DNGs with noise reduction - M3M 11:30; M1P 25:45
Fan turned on for M3M at 1:18; for M1P did not turn on

Nov 08, 2023 at 10:08 PM

hoodlum90
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

jhapeman wrote:
How many CPU and GPU cores does yours have? I just realized that my wife has a 14" M2 Pro 10-core CPU/16-core GPU with 16GB of RAM that I got for her this summer after I last ran these tests. I will have to get Lightroom on there and do the same tests to see.

There doesn’t seem to be much improvement with AI noise reduction times between the M2 PRO and the M3 PRO. You can see the AI noise comparison at the 19 minute mark of this video.

https://youtu.be/5r2D7EG4M38?si=t_zlMkEQ9mn_dE0W

Nov 08, 2023 at 10:38 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

eyal wrote:
Not sure how you made those awesome graphs but here is a quick experiment I just did.

Setup: Macbook Pros disconnected from external monitors, RAID, etc and both rebooted and waited 5 minutes after start

Comparisons:
14" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip (CPU 8P/2E; GPU 16) and 16gb RAM [M1P]
14" MacBook Pro with M3 Max chip (CPU 12P/4E; GPU 40) and 48gb RAM [M3M]

Lightroom Classic - importing from Pergear 520gb CF-E type A using Pergear CFE reader

Lightroom time to open - M3M 5 sec; M1P 10 sec (might have mistimed this one)
Time from Inserting CFE card into reader until LRc opened the...Show more →

Thanks for doing this, it's interesting to see because I have the same 14" MBP M1 Pro configuration. Which LRC version for your tests? 13 or 12.x?

I'm thinking I may wait for the Studio M3 Max.

Nov 08, 2023 at 11:16 PM

eyal
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

LRc 13.0.1

Nov 09, 2023 at 06:18 AM

jhapeman
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

hoodlum90 wrote:
There doesn’t seem to be much improvement with AI noise reduction times between the M2 PRO and the M3 PRO. You can see the AI noise comparison at the 19 minute mark of this video.

https://youtu.be/5r2D7EG4M38?si=t_zlMkEQ9mn_dE0W

This is to be expected though to some extent. It's clear that in this round of chip design and release Apple is re-sorting the whole line to better stagger it. The previous generation M1 and M2 Pro chips performed almost as well as the M2 Max and were just chopped-down versions of a Max. The new M3 Pro is a totally separate design now. It is faster on some things, not on everything. They also eliminated the oddball 13" MBP so this is a whole product line restructuring. The M3 isn't really targeted at someone upgrading from say an M2 or really even an M1, although it does show good boosts over an M1. It's still targeting the last of the Intel MBP owners.

There's now a pretty clean market segmentation between the base M, M Pro and M Max chips. Assuming the M3 Ultra is a similar doubling of a Max like it has been so far, you'll see a big jump from Max to Ultra as well. Apple did similar product line realignment with the iPhone 14 generation where only the new Pro phones got the newest A16 processor to great a bigger split in performance there.

What I am pleasantly surprised by is the jump in performance with the Max over even the less than one year old M2 Max. I also agree with Art that we are likely to see some performance gains as code is optimized for the new GPU architecture in the M3. This is a totally new GPU with a ton of changes, some 3D-related and some not.

I'm just amazed that I can now have a laptop that's almost as fast the M1 Ultra released in March of 2022. That's just crazy. And it still has incredible battery life and is dead silent 99% of the time.

Nov 09, 2023 at 08:33 AM

hoodlum90
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

Art has posted the M3 Max comparisons in Lightroom.

Nov 09, 2023 at 03:11 PM

andyyee
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

Has anyone looked at the effect of memory amount and any of these Lightroom benchmarks? Trying to figure out if I should e.g. upgrade from 64 GB to 128 GB. Will having more memory improve the speed of denoise? Importing or exporting?

Nov 09, 2023 at 10:20 PM

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