I would like DxO to comment on full Apple Silicon support.
I’m holding off making a purchase of DxO software until it is able to run without Rosetta.
My concern isn’t so much performance, but not wanting be stuck with unusable software when Rosetta is inevitably no longer supported by Apple.
I’ve been bitten too many times by developers not keeping up. I am a hobbyist and I cannot justify dropping $100+ every release.
I’m sure that DxO will make themselves heard as soon as Apple Silicon support is available. I’d not expect them to publish an e.t.a. though.
Another consideration besides Full Apple Silicon Support may be the update cycle of PhotoLab. In the past years, new versions of PhotoLab were introduced in late October. While not knowing any details about the roadmap, it may be worth waiting to see if potentially interesting new features will be introduced.
It’s been nearly two years since they had access to the developer kits. DxO has said that their most complicated code that processes photos has already been upgraded to use the GPU in Apple Silicon and that the main executable that is still x86-only mostly just runs UI stuff.
I’m an Apple-centric developer myself and for something like DxO that seems excessive to go nearly two years like this. I have software that’s just as complicated from other, smaller developers that have added their full Apple Silicon support long ago.
I’m not necessarily asking for an ETA. Just a bone, any bone, as to it actively being addressed.
Thanks, chris43. I haven’t tracked DxO closely enough to pick up on what their usual release cycles are. I’ll keep an eye on it.
There is no “risk”, as you put it. I have been using PL5 on my M1 MacBook Air without any issues. I have actually used DxO PL since I bought the M1 when it first came out.
DxO has leveraged some aspects of the M1 to boost performance a lot, the neural processor for DeepPrime NR. Only a matter of time for full M1 support.
i am eagerly awaiting full apple silicon support.
i am also using RAW Power which is fully optimized for M1 and
it’s astonishing the difference when opening a folder with several hundred RAW files.
RAW Power does all the indexing, thumbnail generation very quickly and no loss of responsiveness in the UI.
i want that performance in PL!
PL5.2.2 gets totally bogged down to the point that i’ve created subfolders for any JPEGS when i shoot RAW+JPEG to reduce the burden on PL5.
What I hear you saying is if I buy DxO PL5 now, it will still run when Rosetta is no longer supported? That’s the risk I’m talking about.
When will Rosetta no longer be supported?
Mark
They haven’t said yet. But Apple isn’t exactly accused of keeping legacy support for too long.
It still needs Rosetta. But I wouldn’t worry about DxO not making an Apple Silicon native version before Rosetta disappearing though. By that time at the majority of DxO’s existing and potential Mac customer base will on Apple Silicon Macs and not having a fully native version would be very bad for their sales. I’d actually worry more about how long they will support Intel Macs (if had I just got one and don’t upgrade very often).
My bet is that PL6 and PureRAW 3 will be fully native.
Currently, DxO’s Apple support is based on the MacOS operating system being used. They only support the current version and two previous versions, I believe.
Mark
Thanks for the input folks.
To be clear: my question was about when Apple Silicon would be fully supported. As it stands, without full support software is already outdated. I have been bitten too many times in similar situations.
As I am a photo hobbyist, I cannot justify the expense of buying PL5 without full support. I cannot justify the expense of buying the software more often than every 4-5 years.
I have a copy of DxO 10 or so. I also have plenty of old MacBooks around that can still run it. I’ll get by with that and check back on the situation when PL6 comes out.
For now I’ll consider the question answered. Thanks.
Well, you decide what to spend your money on, but I, for one, have to disagree with your approach. Rosetta 1 was released in 2006 with macOS Tiger and officially discontinued in 2011 with macOS Lion (thought you could still run versions of the OS for a while without upgrading to Lion). Given that Intel versions of Macs can still be bought today, it is very likely that you will be able too run software that has not been fully ported to Apple Silicon for several years, not to mention that DxO and others would obviously move to update the application if Apple discontinued Rosetta 2 support.
Second, you’re missing out on tons of cool stuff! I work a great deal with DeepPRIME; on my quad-core iMac i7 at 4 Ghz, processing a single image (DeepPRRIME plus all edits) took an average of around 45 seconds per image. No big deal, you say, but when you’re running a batch of 100 or so photos, it starts to count. On my 14" MacBook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores), the average drops to under 5 seconds per image! Would I want to forego this leap in performance just because I may be forced to upgrade to a new version of PhotoLab in the next five years or so? Certainly not!
Third, DxO has limited developer resources. I would much rather see them spend these on adding features to PhotoLab than to port insignificant parts of the program to Apple Silicon. They recently gave us DeepPRIME/PureRAW and Fujifilm X-TRANS support—as far as I’m concerned, they can run the UI on Rosetta 2 for as long as Apple supports it.
But as I said, you choose to spend your money the way you want to. I just think it’s a pity that you will be missing out on so much.
Doesn’t sound like I’m missing a whole lot. Again, this is just a hobby. Between now and PL6 I might do 400 photos across maybe 3 exports.
I think I can have the older computers chew away at that while I do something else.
Remember I have been bitten before and I don’t have $100+ to blow each year release to keep up. Peoples’ instance that I do so anyway feels a bit tone deaf to me.
Ultimately, it was up to you to decide how much you want to spend and what functionality you need. Personally I find it difficult going back to previous versions of PhotoLab once the new ones are released. Once I start to use new features I find them indispensable. However the processing requirements of many users may be much simpler than mine. There are many PhotoLab or OpticsPro customers still happily using older versions of the software with no strong motivation to upgrade.
Mark