16 Months Later: Still No Universal App for Apple Silicon

I, for one, am ECSTATIC with PL5’s 3x increase in DeepPRIME processing speed. Everything else about PL5 feels perkier, too.

Waiting patiently for some feedback about the “low memory” bug I reported several days ago… It’s still not fixed with update 5.0.1. My M1 Mac mini with 16GB RAM ran out of memory after exporting 520 JPEGs, about the same as before. Activity Monitor showed about 8GB of “compressed” memory, and the app had gobbled up 5.6GB of RAM.

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Why is DXO Photolab 5 still running under Rosetta ?

Probably because everyone is asking the same and the developers keep being distracted so it slows down the actual work of coding for M1 :thinking:

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What matters most for performance is export. PhotoLab 5 is optimised on Apple Silicon for export. I have a set of 61 Nikon D810 and D850 files with DeepPrime. Export times on an M1 Mac Mini:

  • PhotoLab 4 32m
  • PhotoLab 5 10m38s

Three times faster is pretty optimised in my opinion. Those are real world results on a real world photo set shot in low light and fully developed. It’s not just throwing DeepPrime on some random images and calling it a test.

The sliders and controls seem to work adequately fast on the M1 Mac Mini. Mac Pro 12 core with Radeon VII does seems a tad more responsive (immediate).

My test mule with 8GB of RAM ran out after about 20 images, albeit D810 and D850 (36MP, 45MP).

DeepPrime is seemingly totally content and even ISO agnostic!
The only thing that matters is how many Megapixels per file and in total needs to be developed and which kind of RAW is used.
So it doesn’t really matter if you throw “random images” at it or not.

However lossless compressed RAWs, like Canon *.CR2 and *.CR3, seems to be a little bit faster than uncompressed RAWs in general.

Well if I am doing 1 export then the UI stutters badly and becomes unresponsive until the export is completed so if I am running a batch of exports the UI is basically unusable.

Not sure what is going on but that seems like some rather basic coding problems.

Export is faster but I don’t see a huge difference with the M1 Max 32GB compared to the M1 Air.

My main complaint is that the UI stalls while running exports. There should be plenty of cores to keep the UI running.

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Hi Lucas - if you can just fix the issue with the UI becoming unresponsive while running export jobs that would be a good start. It is really bad having to wait for a batch of exports before you can browse/edit other files.

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I do find that my entire computer (M1 Mac Mini) becomes very unresponsive whilst PL is exporting files. Even some lightweight browsing and replying to emails is frustrating at times (with the type on the screen seriouisly lagging what I’ve typed on the keyboard).

However, this does seem to be a general issue (in my experiene over te years with Aperture, LR, and Exposure X4 & X6) when exporting edits as they all seem to take as much system processing power as they can to export as quickly as possible.

It would be nice if a multi core system could give the user the option to ‘reserve’ a core or two for background tasks whilst the export ustilised all the remaining cores.

However, I am not a software engineer so I have absolutely no idea if that is possible, and if it is then how complex that may be to implement. I’d imagine with these sorts of things, the idea is simple to state, making it is the very hard part…

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It is possible!
The System only has to have enough spare ressources, which all of the M1 should basically have…at least in theory.

My Windows Systems, except maybe a little bit for the Laptop with the Ryzen 5 4500U APU where some minor “stuttering” can be observed, are staying quite to very responsive even with large exports.
The big Zen3 “Workstation” is even behaving mostly as if there is running no export in the background at all.
At least for lighter tasks.

Maybe this has something to do with MacOS or the Emulation?!

I appreciate for many users what matters most performance wise is export speed, but I for one would like a more responsive feel to the editing process too. I feel a lot of my time is spent waiting for the previews to be rendered whenever I apply an edit or zoom into an image. I’d love that to be optimised as much as possible.

On the other hand, export speed is less of a priority for me as often I will leave the machine to export files as I do other things in the office or at home (also slightly forced on me as my computer becomes pretty unresponsive for other tasks once exporting starts). I rarely need to get images exported to a very tight deadline, but I appreciate that for others this is an important necessity.

I guess one of the major challenges with software developpment is balancing the requirements of a lot of users. Many will want faster exporting and others will want other areas to be quicker.

Striking a balance between implementing all of these varying user requests is the wobbly tightrope DxO needs to balance along!

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@Savay Hmmm, I just did a quick Google and there has been some news on Mac memory issues causing performance issues very recently.

I enjoy using DxO in my photography hobby to quickly get the most out of my Canon 6D camera. As I’m not a pro, I only upgrade one in a blue moon. I recently got an M1 Max MacBook Pro and it is certainly time for me to upgrade my DxO software as it has been a few years.

That being said, I cannot justify sinking any new money into apps that do not run fully natively on Apple Silicon hardware and instead rely on Rosetta 2. It is very clear that Rosetta 2 support from Apple is only temporary (see the history with the original Rosetta with the PPC-> Intel transition), and I am very concerned about money spent on Intel-only apps being flushed down the drain in a couple OS updates when it is retired.

When DxO PhotoLab has full support for Apple Silicon in the form of an ARM binary, I will happily buy an upgrade. Until then I’ll just have to get by with workarounds.

Thanks!

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Did you swap the times by mistake? Is PL5 3x faster or slower than PL4?

I swapped the times by mistake. Fixed.

Hello,

I’m deciding for an Apple Macbook Pro 14 or 16".

It will replace my desktop (3700X, 32GB DDR4 @3600MHz, RTX 2080 8GB, 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD…). I need to save space…

My most demanding task is photo edition of Sony A7R IV files (61Mpx) with DxO PhotoLab.
I use Deep Prime, lens corrections and extensive local corrections, as well as film pack profiles.
I have quite large libraries of photos (main 700~800GB, increasing in size, plus ~2TB of archives), with a lot of files in the same directories (what PL seems not to like at all, with sluggish previews…).

I also do stacking for macros, but this is very occasional.
As well as video editing, but same thing, very occasional.
So DxO PL might be the dimensioning use case!

In my budget, options are:
1# 14" / 8C CPU / 16C GPU / 16GB / 512GB (what will require me to store my main photo library on an external SSD and - if it helps with performances - to copy my working file on the internal storage) - 2249 €
2# 14" / 10C CPU / 14C GPU / 16GB / 512GB (same remark) - 2479 €
3# 14" / 10C CPU / 16C GPU / 16GB / 512GB (same remark) - 2519 €
4# 14" / 8C CPU / 14C GPU / 32GB / 512GB (same remark) - 2709 €
6# 14" / 8C CPU / 14C GPU / 16GB / 1TB (main library on internal storage (until it gets too big…), archives on external SSD) - 2479 €
7# 14" / 10C CPU / 14C GPU / 16GB / 1TB (main library on internal storage (until it gets too big…), archives on external SSD) - 2709 €
8# 14" / 10C CPU / 16C GPU / 16GB / 1TB (main library on internal storage (until it gets too big…), archives on external SSD) - 2749 €
9# 16" / 10C CPU / 16C GPU / 16GB / 1TB (what will require me to store my main photo library on an external SSD and - if it helps with performances - to copy my working file on the internal storage) - 2749 €
Would be complicated to put more money; already a (very) big budget for me.

So a lot of different options…and I’m quite lost regarding which one is the option for my use case with DxO PhotoLab.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

Fred

Hi @webzeb

First of all, I suggest you take a look at this video (this guy is amazing).

He has tested different configurations (14" vs 16", 16/32/64GB and so on) on a bunch of typical photo/video workflow (LR, C1,…) and for some scenarios you clearly see that doubling the ram will cut the processing time in half…

////////

I’ll put here some extra info…

DeepPRIME takes full advantage of the Apple Neural Engine. All Macbook Pros do share the same amount of Neural Engine cores (16) and this will ensure, basically, that no matter the model, DeepPRIME will have the same speed across the line.

At the moment, using an M1 Mac with the latest version of PhotoLab, will crunch between 4.5-5Mpx per second, meaning a 61Mpx raw file will need approximately between 15" and 13" to be processed with DP (basically the same score I can achieve on my desktop PC which has an RTX 3070).

About screen size: 14" get busy very quickly. I would only consider this size if extreme portability is what you are looking for. Otherwise, go for the 16".

Storage: there is not a “one-size-fits-all” solution, each user has different needs and workflows…but for me 512GB are a bit too low. I would consider the 1TB option if possible.

From there, just add an external NVMe inside a Thunderbolt enclosure, and you’ll get all the extra storage you need for your projects (with all the speed needed, at a fraction of the cost).

Hope this helps.

Steven.

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Many thanks for this feedback!

Regarding Art’s video, in his tests 32GB seems to make a difference dealing with several GB Photoshop files, panorama stiching, etc.
On my side, I rarely do that. Most of the time DxO PhotoLab is the only tool I use. Sometimes I open Photoshop CC when I need more complex corrections, but my files iften stay below a dozen of layers…

So in such a case, would 32 GB make a difference?

Unfortunately I cannot afford 10C CPU + 32 GB + 1TB + 16". I have to make compromise.

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In this case, 16GB can be enough, it all comes down to someone’s specific workflow.
And as I said above, don’t worry about DeepPRIME with any configuration: you’ll get the same hyper-fast performance thanks to the Neural Cores :wink: .

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My two cents: if you have to make a compromise, do it on what can be extended. External storage can be added at anytime (although not as fast as internal storage) but RAM cannot be changed for instance. Also 16" might not be needed if you have a good external display and work mostly from your desk.

Edit: if you do not need a laptop, you might also want to wait for a few months for Mac Mini M1 Pro/M2 to be released, it’ll be a lot cheaper as it doesn’t come with battery and display.

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Do you clear the cache in preferences before and after big loads?