M1 Ultra Chip and Lightroom S3 Files.

[stump4545]

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The only time LR slows down for me on my iMac Pro is when I zoom in on my Leica S3 file in Develop Mode, it takes LR a few seconds to Focus on pixels which looks like a blurry photo at first.

If I pick up a Mac Studio,  will the the Studio with M1 Max Chip get rid of this delay?

would the M1 Ultra Chip help in this regard or not really?

thank you

[Erato]

Yes, M1 Ultra is more than sufficient to most use cases of graphical requiremens.

If you're not in a rush to get one of the leading edge workstation for S3, then the M2/M2 Pro/M2 Max/M2 Ultra family would be an overkill.

And I do suggest that you may consider the Pro Display XDR in terms of versitile display fulfills many aspects and use cases. 

As a reminder, new iMac Pro is on the way half to the market(they may engraved a new name while release).

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[zeitz]

3 hours ago, stump4545 said:

on my iMac Pro

To answer this question fully, please provide the processors, RAM, graphics chip set, Mac OS version, and LR version in your current iMac Pro.

The largest Raw files I have are about 80 MB.  On my Intel Mac Mini with six 3.2 Ghz i7 cores, 64 mb RAM, AMD Radeon WX 8200 graphics card (in a breakout box), Eizo CX 271, Mac OS Big Sur 11.6, and LR 11.3.1, zooms in Develop are instantaneous.  This is working off a Thunderbolt 3 RAID.

One of the problems with Mac Studio (or any Apple Silicon Mac) is that you can't add an AMD graphics card that is optimized for graphic arts.  Nearly all graphics chip sets are optimized for gamers.  The good AMD cards are still faster than the Mac chip sets.  The other problem with reviews comparing graphics cards is that DaVinci Resolve (video processing) is often used as the test software, not LR or Photoshop.  It should be noted that Adobe products do not make very good use of graphics card GPUs compute units.  Apple refuses to work with Nvidia so their excellent Quadro graphics cards can't be used easily.

I would widen my search for a monitor.  Hopefully you live in an area with value-added monitor dealers who can show you the usual top graphics monitors - Eizo Color Edge, NEC and Ben Q.  Unfortunately I have never found an Apple store or an Apple Value-added Dealer that actually has a Pro Display XDR to look at / try out.  You have to order one trusting Apple.  The XDR has impressive specs.

[Erato]

Please refer to the following video for more details regrading Lightroom and Photoshop benchmarks.

And with no supprised that the 16" M1 Max Pro done well in different use cases.

For those who are a hybrid shooter(video and photo), you may supprised that the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra outperform the Mac Pro(full capacity upgraded to 1.5TB RAM and more) according to Justine's review recently.

 

 

Edited April 22, 2022 by Erato

[Stuart Richardson]

I checked for you on my M1 Max Macbook Pro with 64GB of RAM. When I zoomed in on S3 files, they were sharp as soon as I had zoomed it. If I stayed at 100% and clicked the arrow to go to the next frame, the photo was blurry for about 1-3 seconds. These were on files that had not had their previews built yet. Overall it feels very responsive. Within 1-3 seconds of bringing a photo up in develop, zooming to 100% was sharp immediately. But if I zoomed to 100% immediately on moving to the next photo, it took that 1-3 seconds to get sharp. In other words, if you are looking at photos at a normal speed and working at it at full scale, there is no delay in zooming to 100%. But it will also depend a lot on where your photos are stored. Mine are on the main drive, which is exceptionally fast. If you are using an external drive that will slow you down a lot if it has to access the files on any sort of "normal" storage, like regular SSD or a hard disk.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Stuart Richardson

[zeitz]

On 4/21/2022 at 10:43 PM, Erato said:

Please refer to the following video for more details regrading Lightroom and Photoshop benchmarks.

Thanks very much for the videos.  The first video was very instructive.  (I did not watch the other two.)  The only comparison I wish he would add is Bridge imports on the various machines.  And DaVinci Resolve comparisons would be nice too.

There is a lot of work to be done by the application vendors if they want ultimate performance from their software.

[abukij]

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and what about the new ipad air- m1? does it handle 50-80mb file format? 

I already have a lenovo yoga x1, quite handy, but with some limit, I wonder if an ipad air can be a worth third step (1-desktop, 2-laptop, 3-ipad) for downloading pictures, instagram, quick edit with Lightroom.

What do you think?

[nicci78]

Just build 100% previews during import then store them on SSD. 

Make sure you have 32GB RAM then it should be okay. 
Such trivial task like zooming at 100% do not require M1 Ultra at all. 
By the way, such process is certainly single threaded. So M1 MacBook Air and M1 Ultra Mac Studio will be as fast as each other 

Edited May 25, 2022 by nicci78