Poor performance of Mac Studio M1 Ultra in Lightroom?

[Marius78]

First of all, being my very first message in this forum: greetings to all the people and pardon my rusty English!

First time and frustrated MacOS user here, cautious and wise in nature as I am, took my first bite into Apple directly with a base Mac Studio M1 Ultra desktop. Photography is the intended (and most demanding) usage. Tools: Lightroom, Photoshop, DXO Photolab, Nik Collection and Topaz AI. Maybe some video in the future.

One of the reasons I chose 20 cores CPU over Studio M1 Max (10 cores) was the nicely scaled double of a performance in regards to generating 1:1 Previews in Lightroom (which should feed on CPU cores) as showed here:

ArtIsRight video (16:09 time mark) on YouTube
1000 x Nikon D850 lossless compressed RAWs (45MP) - 8m45s = 525s = 0.53s / image

Some test on macperformanceguide.com
600 x RAW (mix of 45, 60, 100 and 150MP), import (just Add, no Copy) from internal SSD + 1:1 previews = 333s = 0.56s / image

I'm coming from a PC build with Ryzen5 3600x 3.8GHz (6-core), 32GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM, Nvidia GTX 1660 Super 6GB and Samsung EVO 970 Plus NVMe SSDs and Windows 10. I've now got M1 Ultra with 20xCPU, 48xGPU, 32xNE, 64GB memory, 1TB SSD. Feeling that performance with generating 1:1 Previews is more than subpar on my new Mac, I did my own quick testings:

My Mac Studio M1 Ultra (base)
135 x Canon R5 lossless compressed RAWs (45MP) - 1.90s / image
221 x Fuji X-T30 II lossless compressed RAWs (26MP) - 1.82s / image

My PC build (as listed above):
135 x Canon R5 lossless compressed RAWs (45MP) - 1.57s / image
221 x Fuji X-T30 II lossless compressed RAWs (26MP) - 1.42s / image

In conclusion my M1 Ultra is 3.5 times slower than in the online tests and, quite frustrating, also slower than my 3 years old medium PC build. Please, anybody with suggestions on what could be wrong here?

Some useful notes on the case:
- LR version 12.1 & MacOS Ventura 13.0
- LR was opened freshly before each test (no other big apps running in parallel)
- initial test were made with RAWs residing on a Samsung T7 2TB connected through one of the back thunderbolt ports. It made no difference when I moved the files on the internal SSD.
- I did the Canon R5 test multiple times, results were in the 1.84 - 1.96s range
- setting Lightroom performance to CPU only or checking all GPUs boxes seemed to make no difference
- LR Catalog is in its default location on internal SSD, so is LR Camera Raw Cache (set to 40 GB max size)
- during the tests CPU in Activity Monitor stayed at 20-25%, RAM memory slightly increased (but no Swaps used). On the PC, the Ryzen CPU bumped all the way up to 100%. Also, ArtIsRight's YouTube video showed very busy CPU cores.

LE: only have the Mac Studio for some few days, didn't get to put it through his paces, but generally it feels snappy, like one would expect: LR opens quickly, instant previews show no "Loading..." (just a short hesitation), zooming in/out is uber fine, DXO is some 2-3 times faster than on my old PC, endless tabs in Google Chrome is a breeze, etc.

 

[lcubed]

are all the images files on the M1 Ultra internal drive?

 

[lcubed]

this might also be applicable since it doesn't sound like your gpu's are being fully utilized.
stolen from adobe:

'
Your model of MacBook Pro has at least 16GB of memory. Therefore, it will meet all of the systems requirements for full GPU acceleration support. However, the GPU self check when launching LrC has probably detected an issue and disabled all or part of GPU acceleration. This is not unusual after an OS update. Fortunately, it's relatively to fix this. You need to use 'Finder' to navigate to the below location then delete the contents of the folder. LrC will recreate same when it relaunches. All being well, you will have Full GPU support again



'Users > yourname > Library > Application Support > Adobe > CameraRaw > GPU > Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic''

 

[Marius78]

this might also be applicable since it doesn't sound like your gpu's are being fully utilized.
stolen from adobe:

Your model of MacBook Pro has at least 16GB of memory. Therefore, it will meet all of the systems requirements for full GPU acceleration support. However, the GPU self check when launching LrC has probably detected an issue and disabled all or part of GPU acceleration. This is not unusual after an OS update. Fortunately, it's relatively to fix this. You need to use 'Finder' to navigate to the below location then delete the contents of the folder. LrC will recreate same when it relaunches. All being well, you will have Full GPU support again

Users > yourname > Library > Application Support > Adobe > CameraRaw > GPU > Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic''

Sorry, that's not it. Preview generating is done by CPU in LR. Anyway LR sais "Apple M1 Ultra full graphics acceleration is enabled" and as mentioned in my original post, I did test with CPU only and with GPU activated, same results (which is expected, since GPU is not used in this case). Tested with files on both external SSD and internal, same results.

 

[Pressure]

Did you try and test performance between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic?

Adobe still has some work to do with Apple Silicon.

 

[Marius78]

Did you try and test performance between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic?

Adobe still has some work to do with Apple Silicon.

Nope, didn't think of that. I only ever used the desktop / local variant, Classic, not the cloud one. But still, the reference tests I quoted were in Classic...

 

[Marius78]

Got the solution on another forum, here it is:

In LRC Preferences > Performance, there's a "Generate Previews in parallel" checkbox at the bottom. I assumed it has to do with generating the previews in the background. Nope! It unleashes all the available CPU cores.

Repeated the test with the 135 R5 files and - voila - 0.55s / image! CPU activity jumped from 20-25% to 98%, CPU temperature rose from 30-ish C to 60C, and wattage from 10W to 100W. More on this: https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...te-previews-in-parallel-quot-do/td-p/12986863

 

[lcubed]

gotta love adobe software. thanks for doing the digital archaeology

 

[Killerbob]

lol - I just saw this thread and I was going to say “remember to turn on parallel processing” I had the same experience last year, importing D850 RAW files using my M1 Max Mac Studio… The processing has also improved the last 7 months with the Adobe updates…