14" M1 Pro vs. Max Photography Lightroom Comparison

[vvgogh]

I'm deciding between (1) 14" M1 Pro 10 core / 16 gpu / 16 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD and (2) 14" M1 Max 32 gpu / 64 GB RAM / 4 TB SSD.

I compared a couple of things, SSD speed and processing of very large raw files with Lightroom Classic 11.0 (Build 202110120910) Apple Silicon version.

(A) SD Card slot transfer of 5.32 GB Sony ARIV raw files (Delkin UHS II 300 MB/sec card)
(1) 28.7s / 190 MB/s (63% of rated)

(B) SSD Speed, Amorphous SEQ1M QD8, 8 GiB
(1) 6855 MB/s Read , 6107 MB/s Write
(2) 7317 MB/s Read (+7%), 7493 MB/s Write (+23%)

(C) Lightroom with Sony a7RIV Compressed 60 MP raw file stored on local SSD
(i) Super Resolution (240MP) generation of bighorn sheep (782 MB .dng) "Adobe cites as gpu intense"
(1) 26.0s (LR estimates 15s)
(2) 22.5s (LR estimates 15s)
(ii) Export of (i) into 100 MP / 80% jpeg
(1) 29.2s export
(2) 17.0s export
(iii) Panorama Generation of 9x 60 MP raws (931 MB .dng)
(2) much faster, didn't time. I think this is entirely CPU. The extra RAM helped since CPU is the same
(iv) Export of pano (iii) - 228 MP (cropped after alignment) into 100 MP / 80% jpeg
(2) 22.5s

(D) Weight
(1) 1607g
(2) 1629g (+22g)

(2) peaked at 45 GB of RAM used. I guess (1) was swapping a lot, but the SSD is fast.

I was waffling on the > 32 GB of RAM, but Lightroom wants to use it and the extra GPUs help on export, though not as much on Super Resolution AI which is cited as being GPU intensive. Perhaps I should try again in a day or two as (2) was just initialized and maybe its indexing. Perhaps I'll keep computer (2).

I meant to put this in the Macbook Pro section. Not sure how to delete it from the other forum.

 

[Fomalhaut]

The big difference seems to be export and panorama generation. If you're going to be doing a lot of exports (and I note that it was only 30s on the M1 Pro for 60 RAW photos), then *maybe* the M1 Max is worth it.

Sounds like you need 32GB on the M1 Pro in any case - being memory limited may have skewed the results.

My take (for video editing and heavy-duty software development tasks, which are my possible use cases) is that the M1 Max is a case of "diminishing returns" for many workloads. It is often only "somewhat better" - ranging from 0% to 40-50% for many tasks, with a few (GPU only) tasks showing almost linear improvement of 100% between 16 and 32 cores - your photo exports being a good example.

There was an Anand Tech review comparing the two SoCs that showed the M1 Max only used memory bandwidths of about 240GB/s despite its 400 GB/s specification, due to limitations in other parts of the chip (or the software).

I am starting to think that the M1 Max is really only worth it if you know that you have a specific workload that will take good advantage of it. I can totally see that someone who needs to perform long-running tasks many times a week would welcome any significant time saving, particularly if they are doing it professionally.

 

[Chancha]

This video pretty much confirms that panorama stitching and some other LR tasks are bottlenecked by the 16GB. I do not think Lightroom Classic has much if anything that would benefit a lot from the extra GPU cores in the Max (save for the Ai x4 feature which is kind of new). For LR usage with large MP RAWs as long as you have 32GB+ RAM, it seems even the base 14" M1 Pro with 2 fewer performance cores can still fare really well.

(btw if you are serious about Ai image enlargement, software like Topaz Labs AI maybe worth looking at since it takes use of Apple's neural engine, where these new M1 Pro/Max have accelerators on chip)