Settings for image correction make a big difference. I’ve just run the D850 test with PhotoLab 5.1.1 on macOS 12.1 on a MBP 14 M1 Pro 10/16 16GB memory.
With just DeepPrime turned on at 40, the five images processed in 32s. With my default set of corrections for D850 files (Leica M9 colour, lens sharpening, auto-horizon, auto-crop), the process time jumped to 36s. With another more intensive set of corrections but no local corrections, processing jumped to 45s.
These times are quite extraordinary as my MBP is now overloaded (didn’t close many apps before starting up PhotoLab 5 as I didn’t feel like restarting all my other work) with memory pressure of 63 and 9 GB of swap and I’m tabbing back into my browser to keep working during the testing (which is the other application using the most memory).
Great export times don’t prevent PhotoLab 5 from misbehaving on an M1 Pro Mac. Memory for PhotoLab 5 is at 10.5 GB (would be about 4 GB on an Intel Mac). Spotify playback got choppy while exporting and typing slowed down (nothing like as bad as the base M1 Mac Mini with 8/8 configuration though).
The main reason I did these tests right now was that there was a result in for the M1 Pro from forum name 4 which I couldn’t believe, 31s while there is a conflicting result of 77s for the same M1 Pro 10/16 configuration.
This is half the time of the Radeon 5500XT in the charts and faster or competitive with some of the most powerful GPU’s in existence. My Radeon VII with AMD hardware acceleration enabled (Apple disables it by default, one has to add OpenCore to get it) did outperform the M1 Pro (5 or 6 sec per image with full set of adjustments including DeepPrime) but I don’t have it hooked up right now.
In any case, the M1 Pro does get these good numbers, which I would have expected from the M1 Max but not the M1 Pro. I wonder if the M1 numbers on PhotoLab 5 (almost as good at 35s) hold up to scrutiny. I don’t have a plain M1 here any more to test against. When I tested on my own files, there was a huge difference with PhotoLab 5 on an M1 Mac Mini vs PhotoLab 4.
Just dug up the previous test I ran on 61 D850/D810 images in a real set on an M1 Mac Mini with 8GB memory.
- PhotoLab 4 - 32m
- PhotoLab 5 - 10m38s
That is about 3x faster so the M1 35s result looks reasonable. This suggests that for PhotoLab export it doesn’t make much difference which M1 Mac one chooses (M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max). Again I don’t find the editing experience under Rosetta particularly good in comparison to my Intel Macs, with small delays and micro-stutter as well those memory leak issues so I don’t recommend moving to M1 architecture for PhotoLab at all, pushing those of us without Catalina/Big Sur/Monterey Macs to upgrade to either a poor user experience or to Intel Macs which will soon be made obsolete.
All the more reason for DxO not to have cut off Mojave before its time. Capture One 22 does run on Mojave.