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New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC

  
 
swifty168
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p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC




andyyee wrote:
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?

Been watching some video tests. Seems if your files size/quantities are within the RAM limits without need to swap (with SSD), then performance are similar. But once you exceed that then performance seem to drop quite dramatically.
I’m trying to figure out whether 14/30 with 96GB RAM would be a better buy or 16/40 with 64GB RAM since they’re similarly priced.



Nov 10, 2023 at 05:23 AM
andyyee
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p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


swifty168 wrote:
Been watching some video tests. Seems if your files size/quantities are within the RAM limits without need to swap (with SSD), then performance are similar. But once you exceed that then performance seem to drop quite dramatically.
I’m trying to figure out whether 14/30 with 96GB RAM would be a better buy or 16/40 with 64GB RAM since they’re similarly priced.


Yes very interested in the answer to your question about the two different configurations! It seems that 16/40 would be faster though?



Nov 10, 2023 at 06:19 AM
RustyBug
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p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


andyyee wrote:
Yes very interested in the answer to your question about the two different configurations! It seems that 16/40 would be faster though?


If the 16 / 40 has more memory bandwidth ... I'd take 2X bandwidth over 1.5X memory (for same $$$).



Nov 10, 2023 at 06:31 AM
swifty168
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p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC




RustyBug wrote:
If the 16 / 40 has more memory bandwidth ... I'd take 2X bandwidth over 1.5X memory (for same $$$).


I believe it’s 300GB/s for the 14/30 and 400GB/s for the 16/40 so more like 1.33X the bandwidth.
But at least according to one YouTuber, the bandwidth isn’t close to being maxed out currently so apparently the quantity matters more atm.
So it’s a case of whether more CPU/GPU cores or more memory makes a bigger practical difference?



Nov 10, 2023 at 08:37 AM
RustyBug
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p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


swifty168 wrote:
I believe it’s 300GB/s for the 14/30 and 400GB/s for the 16/40 so more like 1.33X the bandwidth.
But at least according to one YouTuber, the bandwidth isn’t close to being maxed out currently so apparently the quantity matters more atm.
So it’s a case of whether more CPU/GPU cores or more memory makes a bigger practical difference?


I think it is process dependent. Stitching and uprezzing may benefit differently from NR vs. export vs. editing, etc.



Nov 10, 2023 at 09:22 AM
WillR
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p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


Ars Technica has a nice review of the M3 Pro

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/testing-apples-m3-pro-more-efficient-but-performance-is-a-step-sideways/

The gist is that performance is essentially the same, or very slightly better, than the M2 Pro but energy consumption for the same tasks is substantially down. So battery life should be better and the laptop should run cooler under heavy loads.

For me, coming from a 16 Mb 2019 Intel MacBook, the 36 Mb M3 Pro is a huge upgrade and a good balanced choice, but if I had an M2 Pro, I would not upgrade.

Will



Nov 10, 2023 at 09:28 AM
rscheffler
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p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


If I've understood some other comments correctly, it seems like the M3 Pro chip has been nerfed somewhat so that the Max chip stands out more in comparison? Therefore it wouldn't be surprising if it has minimal gains over the M2 Pro. Jeff's charts in the first post indicate that in the Max line, there is consistent performance improvement between M1, M2 and M3 generations.


Nov 10, 2023 at 12:20 PM
WillR
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p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


I’m not sure I’d describe the M3 pro as nerfed, at least generationally. Its performance is at least as good as the M2 pro. But Apple chose to use generational improvements to decrease power consumption rather than increase performance. The M3 pro is however nerfed in its performance relationship to the M3 Max.

For me, the balance Apple struck works out. I’m a hobbyist photographer and 1 minute to denoiise as opposed to 30 seconds is fine. As compared to my intel MacBook, I will appreciate not having fans blowing all the time

Will



Nov 10, 2023 at 12:51 PM
jhapeman
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p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


andyyee wrote:
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?


In some of the earlier tests I posted I had machines that varied from 32GB up to 128GB--several Mac Studios. The short answer for you is no. It doesn't matter.

Where more memory can matter is if you are running a lot of large displays or you like to keep a pile of apps open. Even then in my use with two ProDisplay XDRs 64GB was the limit, anything more than really had no impact on performance in Lightroom or Photoshop. I suppose one place you might notice it is if you are doing a lot of stitching of massive multi-gigapixel panoramas.



Nov 11, 2023 at 09:26 AM
jhapeman
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p.2 #10 · p.2 #10 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


WillR wrote:
I’m not sure I’d describe the M3 pro as nerfed, at least generationally. Its performance is at least as good as the M2 pro. But Apple chose to use generational improvements to decrease power consumption rather than increase performance. The M3 pro is however nerfed in its performance relationship to the M3 Max.

For me, the balance Apple struck works out. I’m a hobbyist photographer and 1 minute to denoiise as opposed to 30 seconds is fine. As compared to my intel MacBook, I will appreciate not having fans blowing all the time

Will


You're going to be amazed coming from the 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. So much faster, so much cooler and quieter. I got my first M1 for my wife when they were released and it stunned me how the original M1 (not even a Pro!) was faster than my top of the line 2019 16" MBP.



Nov 11, 2023 at 11:10 AM
 


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eyal
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p.2 #11 · p.2 #11 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


Main nit against the M3 Max so far is that it spins up the fan far more than the M1 Pro did.

Has done on all Lightroom imports as well as exporting (M1 Pro did it then too). That being said, it is building standard previews in less than half the time of the M1 Pro.



Nov 11, 2023 at 03:53 PM
jhapeman
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p.2 #12 · p.2 #12 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


eyal wrote:
Main nit against the M3 Max so far is that it spins up the fan far more than the M1 Pro did.

Has done on all Lightroom imports as well as exporting (M1 Pro did it then too). That being said, it is building standard previews in less than half the time of the M1 Pro.


Yes, I noticed that as well although I was wondering if that was just a change Apple made in how much it is pushing the processors. I felt like on the M1 generation there was performance left on the table as it seemed impossible to really push the CPU/GPU really hard.

The only time I've had the fans spin up is during the preview generation (I don't generate previews at import all of the time; if you import without previews it won't spin up the fans) and exports. Preview generation will hit all of the CPU cores hard and exports use the CPU and GPU.




Nov 11, 2023 at 04:34 PM
Goodrich
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p.2 #13 · p.2 #13 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


I’m less concerned about the speed of the tasks that can be run in the background than in the responsiveness of Lightroom / DXO Photolabs. It is there that the new chip delivers. No need to pregenerate previews and use extra disk space when they appear very quickly on the fly. Yes, the M3 Max is a refinement of its predecessors but it makes editing less tiring.

I think that there may be more app optimisation as there doesn’t seem to be much GPU usage at present; only the extra CPUs are contributing to the performance boost.



Nov 11, 2023 at 05:31 PM
swifty168
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p.2 #14 · p.2 #14 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC



eyal wrote:
Main nit against the M3 Max so far is that it spins up the fan far more than the M1 Pro did.

Has done on all Lightroom imports as well as exporting (M1 Pro did it then too). That being said, it is building standard previews in less than half the time of the M1 Pro.

Wondering did you have it in high power mode or automatic? Is there an efficient mode?
Just thinking about my workflow, I’d probably manually configure the power if automatic mode doesn’t do a great job with regards to fan spin and heat.
So high power on imports/exports but doing it on a desk but auto or efficient mode when using it on my lap.



Nov 11, 2023 at 10:04 PM
jhapeman
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p.2 #15 · p.2 #15 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


swifty168 wrote:
Wondering did you have it in high power mode or automatic? Is there an efficient mode?
Just thinking about my workflow, I’d probably manually configure the power if automatic mode doesn’t do a great job with regards to fan spin and heat.
So high power on imports/exports but doing it on a desk but auto or efficient mode when using it on my lap.



On the Apple silicon MacBook Pros in 14" and 16" (for the M3; on the previous M1 and M2 it was 16" only) there is setting for high power mode when plugged in. That said, in my experience and with my benchmark testing it really makes no difference at all in Lightroom. My guess is that it the high power requirements for Lightroom are pretty short anyway, so the system never has to sustain the high power for any longer than it would do using "automatic" mode. My understanding is that it is useful for some games where they can sustain high power usage for much longer. It's best to just leave it on automatic.



Nov 12, 2023 at 08:18 AM
WillR
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p.2 #16 · p.2 #16 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


So I tried some additional Lightroom benchmarking, and also some watching of what my Macbook was doing during the tests.

I'm using a 36 Gbyte M3 Pro Macbook. For each test, I started Lightroom from scratch, but I had a few other apps running as I would in normal operation (Mail, Calendar and Safari with about 5 tabs).

Test 1: I exported 1495 Sony A7riv raw files as full size JPEGS. This is similar to the test jhapeman did, although the raw files are about 20% larger than the Sony A1 files he used. The Macbook was not plugged in for this test, and it started "cold". That is, I had not done anything compute-intensive with it.
Time to export: 19 minutes 40 seconds. This is roughly comparable to the time jhapeman found for an M1 Max to export about the same number of Sony A1 files. So a pretty good performance.

About a minute into this test I noticed the fans come on. They stayed on for about a minute and then shut off. They did not come on again for the whole test. I was not monitoring cpu usage when this happened. Later, I looked at cpu usage and it was hovering around 1000% CPU and 90% GPU, whatever that actually means. I monitored memory pressure at various times during the test. Lightroom started at about 12 gbytes usage and slowly climbed to about 24 Gbytes over the ~ 20 minutes. For the first 80% of the test memory pressure was almost always green, with very occasional periods where it was yellow. In the last 20% of the test it was yellow more often. At the end of the test, the Macbook was warm, but not nearly as scorching as my old Intel machine would get.

Test 2: I decided to try the test again with the Macbook plugged in. In the end, I don't think it matters whether its plugged in or not, but I noticed something else. This time the fans did not come on at all. The test took a little longer: 20 minutes 40 seconds. Importantly, I had only waited about five minutes between the first test and the second.

My guess here was that the Macbook was doing some sort of throttling that occurred when the fans came on. Evidently, whatever it was doing to control thermals at the beginning of the first test was good enough, so that fans weren't needed for the rest of the time. In the second test, I was starting warm, and I'm guessing it throttled right from the start. So I think the machine is tuned to avoid fans as much as possible.

I tried a second set of tests

Test 3: I used about 1/3 the number of files in the export (470). The first time I did this test, the machine was still "warm", and, as in the second test, the fans never came on. Also there was not much memory pressure. This export took 7 minutes 40 seconds.

The time is a little longer than I expected given the number of files and the fact that there was no memory pressure, but it was roughly proportional to the number of files

Test 4: I did the same test, but started cold. And this time I watched CPU and GPU usage. At the start the CPU was ~1000% and the GPU was ~90%. As in the first test, about a minute in, the fans came on. At this point the CPU dropped to ~650% and the GPU to ~60%. After a minute, the fans stopped. But then slowly the CPU climbed back up to ~1000% and the GPU to ~90%. They stayed there, and the test took 7:36 seconds.

In this last test, you can see the throttling as the CPU and GPU utilization drop. But then what is happening after the fans shut off and the utilization climbs again? Is the Macbook throttling in a different way that doesn't show up in utilization? I have no idea.

Anyway, I'm happy than fans seem not to come on very much even in intensive operations.

-Will



Nov 12, 2023 at 04:24 PM
elkhornsun
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p.2 #17 · p.2 #17 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


The CPU, even with an integrated GPU, is not the gating factor when processing many still image files or video. How much Ram and the throughput from the drive and the ports if connecting via Ethernet to a NAS, are all more important.

I remember compiling a program that took 60 minutes with the Intel 8086 processor and then 30 minutes with the 286 processor and finally 1 minute with the 386 processor. At that point any gains were meaningless in terms of my own productivity.

I care more about my ability to have an internal dual NVMe M.2 RAID1 setup inside my computer so no issues with port speeds. Many Windows machines have this capability but with Apple the only ones I know that provide a way to do this is the $9,000 Mac Pro workstation.

As always Apple provides the best operating systems and the worst and most expensive by far, hardware implementations for its computers.



Nov 12, 2023 at 06:05 PM
jhapeman
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p.2 #18 · p.2 #18 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


elkhornsun wrote:
The CPU, even with an integrated GPU, is not the gating factor when processing many still image files or video. How much Ram and the throughput from the drive and the ports if connecting via Ethernet to a NAS, are all more important.

I remember compiling a program that took 60 minutes with the Intel 8086 processor and then 30 minutes with the 286 processor and finally 1 minute with the 386 processor. At that point any gains were meaningless in terms of my own productivity.

I care more about my ability to have an internal dual NVMe M.2 RAID1
...Show more

This is completely incorrect and easily proven so with even a tiny bit of effort and research. In fact, my results clearly show that the newer and faster CPUs/GPUs complete the tasks in less time, and they are using the same speed SSD and RAM (all of the Apple Silicon generations use the same LPDDR5 memory).

My PCs I've used for testing also have PCIe NVMe RAID and it didn't give them any edge. This is a thread about the performance of Lightroom on the new Apple Silicon Macs; if you don't have anything better than a baseless whine to contribute then you're just trolling.





Nov 12, 2023 at 06:41 PM
FrankA373
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p.2 #19 · p.2 #19 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


For what it’s worth I did two tests with Lightroom’s new noise reduction. M1 Pro, 32 gig ram, 24 GPU. Olympus OM-1 file took about 18 seconds. Hasselblad X2D file took about 38 seconds. I don’t batch process other than to import files into Lightroom after a shoot. Sometimes that can be 200 to 400 files and the time to do that doesn’t bother me. I don’t export in batch either.


Nov 13, 2023 at 12:22 PM
jhapeman
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p.2 #20 · p.2 #20 · New Lightroom Benchmarks: Mac M3 Max and PC


FrankA373 wrote:
For what it’s worth I did two tests with Lightroom’s new noise reduction. M1 Pro, 32 gig ram, 24 GPU. Olympus OM-1 file took about 18 seconds. Hasselblad X2D file took about 38 seconds. I don’t batch process other than to import files into Lightroom after a shoot. Sometimes that can be 200 to 400 files and the time to do that doesn’t bother me. I don’t export in batch either.


The M1 is a very capable device. My testing is not meant as reason someone should upgrade; if they are thinking of doing so it's a very useful comparison. That said, I think even Apple's primary target for the M3 is customers still using the older Intel MacBooks.

That said, if you are using one for business purposes and do large shoots with tons of imports/exports or large batch DeNoise operations the time adds up fast, and in business time is money. In my business we're importing and exporting hundreds of images a day. Over the course of year I can save an entire week's worth of one employee's time at a minimum, and more like two weeks. That's real money and a faster machine will pay for itself pretty quickly. YMMV of course.



Nov 13, 2023 at 12:47 PM
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