PL5 performance on old Macbook

I wonder how the performance of PL5 will be on my 2015 Macbook Pro (Intel i5 with 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris Graphics 6100). Will there be any performance benefit? Any experiences out there?

Why not download the trial version and try it out?

What version of MacOS are you using?

Mark

Input “2015 Macbook Pro” in the search field at the top of this page. There are some posts.

Big Sur at present.

I was asking because Mojave and anything older is not supported by Photolab 5. With regard to performance, I’m not the one to ask. However I’m pretty confident that your Intel graphics card will not accelerate DeepPrime NR processing, which means that specific feature will likely run very slow on your machine.

Mark

CPU/Intel GPU processing of DeepPrime is unusably slow on both PhotoLab 4 and 5. Normal Prime works just fine though. Most of the time Prime quality is enough. If you have really important/art grade photos shot in high ISO, you will want DeepPrime. I shoot a lot of high ISO and hence have done a lot of testing around noise reduction.

I’m not the one to sell you a new Apple computer (this forum has full-time staff dedicated to that task @Joanna @zkarj @florisvaneck) but the least expensive most capable Mac which is fairly future-proofed (at least three or four OS iterations beyond Monterey) would be an M1 Mac Mini. Make sure to get 16 GB of RAM. PhotoLab barely runs properly on 8GB of RAM as it uses between 4 and 7 itself depending on the set.

The one good point about the M1 Mac Mini is that it’s silent. I mean really and truly silent, even when exporting DeepPrime images.

Any used Intel Mac which can run Catalina and has a dedicated GPU will run PhotoLab competently including DeepPrime. There’s probably people almost giving away older iMacs at this point. There is a big difference in export times. These sample times are for Nikon D850 NEFs shot in low light with full processing and with DeepPrime enabled:

  • Radeon VII: 5 seconds/image (multitasking works fine)
  • WX7100 (basically a Radeon RX 580): 15 second/image (Mac Pro keeps multitasking very well)
  • M1 Mac Mini: 20 seconds/image (locks up computer while exporting)
  • WX5100: 50 seconds per image (locks up Mac Pro but not as hard as M1 Mac Mini)
  • CPU processing on 2011 MBP: 30 minutes/image (that’s not a typo)

Happy hunting!

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Alec, Thanks for following up. .I’m not a Mac user, as I’m pretty sure you know, so I can’t speak to performance of those machines. On Windows machines the DeepPrime processing is all over the place depending on the hardware and most importantly the graphics card. On a high-end machine with a high-end graphics card, processing a 24 megapixel raw file can take as little as three or four seconds. On sn older low end machine with an unusable graphic card GPU, the same file to take as much as 8 or 10 minutes or more.

My aging mid-level i7 machine with the Nvidia GTX 1040ti processes raw files with DeepPRIME in 21 seconds. Using the CPU only, It takes close to 70 seconds.

Mark

Just because you have a grudge against DxO doesn’t give you the right to make defamatory remarks about other contributors to these forums.

Do you really think I enjoy having to pay out every few years for new computers? As a software developer and consultant, I am only too well aware of Apple’s increasingly frequent hardware and OS update cycles. But that is the price I have to pay for wanting to be part of the Apple ecosystem - I would certainly never go back to Windows for my own use and, for a major Windows project, I actually installed Windows in a Parallels VM on a Mac, so that I could guarantee when Windows crashed and burned, I still had a working computer.

If any business worth its salt commits to using Macs and Mac-based software, unless they are totally naĂŻve, they must know full well the financial and other costs involved and plan for such eventualities.

In the end, it is Apple that is causing the pain - DxO are just trying to mitigate their ongoing and future liabilities in terms of support and further development for an evolving platform. And, in case that isn’t clear enough, let me reiterate that I am not supporting Apple, I’m supporting DxO because I understand the difficult decisions that they have had to make in this regard.

If, as it would seem from your other posts, you are a fan of DxO, but not of Apple, there is a simple solution - move to Windows where it is obvious that you can totally rely on Microsoft not to cause you such problems and still use DxO products.

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Wow! Incredible! All that anger!

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Stop fighting, please! I didn’t want to start a war. Back to my original question. I downloaded the trial version and processed a 3200 ISO picture with deep prime both with PL4 and PL5. PL4 took 3 minutes, seven seconds, PL5 took 2 minutes, 59 seconds. No big difference. Both jpegs have the same size and look pretty much the same on my display.
Concerning Apple I dislike some of their business policies, e.g. selling repair-unfriendly devices, using tax avoidance schemes, tolerating or even encouraging exploitation and suppression practices of their suppliers in China and elsewhere. On the other hand, I like using the equipment they sell. And at least they still offer OS updates and upgrades for my six year old machine.
And I would certainly prefer Macron over Stalin.

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My sincere apologies, I didn’t expect a war either.

That sounds perfectly reasonable and it’s really interesting to note that you are using an i5 when, apparently, someone at DxO told @Cove the it would not be sufficient.

Yup, that’s just about where I am.