Looking for some opinions and hopefully ‘real world’ experiences of running PL9 with 16gb Ram against 24gb.
I appreciate the DxO Recommended amount of ram is 32gb and an M2 Pro but for my purposes/options I will be buying a machine with either 16gb or 24gb.
So as of right now I can run PL other than my old v5 and it’s not a pleasant experience due to the age and specification of my old MacBook. serves its purpose for other tasks but starting to really struggle with anything to do with photo editing beyond the basics and has seen me using my LR on my M1 iPad Pro for that but I generally preferred my outputs from PL which isn’t an option with the iPad, so. its time to consider a new MacBook (minis etc not an option as I need the MacBook for its portability).
Basically I will be buying either the:
M4 (base) MacBook Air with either 24gb ram or,
M5 MacBook Pro with 16gb ram alternatively I have the option of,
M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 24gb ram for roughly the same price as the M5.
I terms of storage all identical.
I guess, discounting the M4 Pro for a moment and the other differences in equipment between the M4 and M5 ‘base’ chips, I am wondering how much of a detriment if any having only 16gb with the M5 will make when running/using PL9 vs saving some money and going with the M4 but more ram (24gb) but losing some of the niceties of the Pro models vs Air models.
And then I guess we bring the M4 Pro back into the equation with 24gb ram plus the ‘better’ chip. But. Will that ‘better’ chip make any noticeable real world differences with something like PL9?
Has anyone run a base vs pro M4 system and seen a worthwhile increase in performance?
Been going around in circles the past couple of days on this one now so just seeking some input a real experience(s) if possible because whilst the likes of LR recommend 16gb and Affinity 8gb it seems PL would like double or more than that.
Is PL really that much more complex or inefficient even?
Just seems quite a contrast in recommended specs and for me photo processing will be the only ‘intensive’ task the machine will be used for.
Anyway. if you read all that then thanks and again thanks for any insights anyone can/wants to add.
Apple Silicon chips rely on memory shared between processing and display units. This means “the more, the merrier” and if you want to limit funds, they should rather be going into RAM than in processors. Here’s why:
In normal operations, anything in front of you is a lot faster than you are
During export, parallel processing can help to a certain degree, but PL’s choices are limited in version 9: I can switch between 1 and 2 on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air while earlier versions offered more parallel processes and settings of 3 or 4 made batch conversions quicker to complete. Therefore, the number of units seems almost irrelevant. (I’m still talking M1)
Drive space upgrades tend to be expensive, but local drive space is faster than anything you can attach without having to go even more expensive.
You could also check the geekbench browser. Synthetic but informative nevertheless.
My macbook is an M2 MAX with 32 GB RAM and an 8TB SSD,
I bought this refurbished and it seems to run faster than a friend’s 16GB M4 with a small SSD. Says the friend.
I’m on a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM, Running PL9 with DeepPrime rendering and High Quality preview rendering enabled (both are supposed to give a bit of a performance hit).
Is there some lag? Yes.
Is it unbearable? Not at all.
AI masks can be slightly slow, especially compared to LR and Capture One, but again - not unbearable.
If I were you, I’d go for the M4 Pro w/ 24gb.
M5 is definitely not necessary. The extra RAM vs 16GB will give you more bang for buck, and the Pro is just nicer compared to the Air (better screen and MUCH better speakers).
I’m on a ten year old Windows system: (Xeon E3-1231 v3, 32GB DDR3 RAM, 1080Ti, Windows 10 Home).
At product launch/trying the trial, PL9 threw frequent errors when trying to enable masking and during certain export operations. These have largely gone away for me.
Performance issues remain a big problem. The very latest release (build 9.2.1) performs terribly on my system with export times (per image) of 2 minutes 30 seconds or more. The previous build (9.2.0) by contrast will export an image in ~32 seconds. I’ve “downgraded” to that version for the time being.
That aside, performance very quickly deteriorates with use, usually accelerated with the addition of masks (only 2 or 3 masks). I’m getting pauses between so much of the functionality once that kicks in and only a restart will fix it.
I was able to run PL9 on an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM. It was fine for editing a single image at a time but struggled when trying to apply AI masks to multiple images.
Under Settings/Advanced I could only process ONE image at a time for export.
I now have a 48GB RAM Mac Mini M4 and under Settings/Advanced I can export TEN images at a time.
My experience is RAM matters less on the M processors.
I used PL5, 6, 7, and 8 on an M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. Certainly PL8 was plenty fast enough. I forget which version had performance problems; it may have been as long ago as 4.
PL9 changes the equation with the new masking engine (even if you don’t use AI masks). Now I have an M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 48GB of RAM and it’s sluggish once masks are deployed, even without High Quality Preview. Compare this with @unchdxoly’s experience on a MUCH lower spec machine.
What this says to me is that PL9 has performance issues. Period. If your work is going to be affected, it’ll be affected no matter which model you get. Just slightly more or slightly less.
If you care about export times, then M5 > M4 > M3 etc because the Neural Engine cores get faster. The leap between M3 and M4 was substantial. I’ve not seen the claims for M5 (mostly because I don’t want to be tempted like I was with the M4!)
The good news about Neural Engine cores is that, so far, every Mac with an M processor has had the same number of them, excepting the very expensive Mx Ultra Mac Studio. So your Neural Engine performance will be no different between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro of the same generation.
As an aside, I know a chap in the UK who uses an 8GB M2 Mac Mini running OBS to stream audio and video for his church. He has zero problems with it.
This article by Thom Hogan might be useful. Lots of good stuff on his website, especially if you’re a Nikon shooter. Based on this (and budgetary considerations) I’m using a M3 Macbook Air 24/512. I don’t develop hundreds of images at a time and I’m happy with the performance with DXO.
I don’t use complex masking so I might have spoken out of turn, depending on OP’s use of masking. I just tried adding 5 masks (3 AI and 2 non-AI). With those in the equation, there was a notable decrease in performance when making adjustments after that.
Still isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but some sliders are taking about 0.5 to 1 seconds to show me the result of the after making my adjustments with all those 5 masks enabled (while some sliders happen almost instantly, still).
This YouTuber compares a large number of MacBooks specifically in terms of image editing. Although not with DxO products, the results show the differences in performance between the latest MacBooks.
Scroll down a little and you’ll find lots of tests:
Sorry for the late response and thank you all for taking the time to offer your insights and experiences.
As it stands I have been leaning towards the one of the two 24gb options vs the M5 16gb ‘base’ model. The inclusion of the M5 was more a case of ‘it’s the newest’ so seemed worth considering.
The Air will obviously safe money on the initial purchase but come with an ‘inferior’ chip and screen which might be debatable of whether its noticeable in real world use (for me) but equally to me has an inferior chassis from ports perspective.
The M4 Pro should obviously be better in pure performance terms vs the Air, or you would at least hope so given the price difference!
But thats the rub. The price difference. I can afford it which isn’t the issue but still want to feel it’s justified which might be harder to quantify.
having said that though I am leaning towards just pulling the trigger on the M4 Pro because being honest compared to my current system it will be an absolute night and day difference and id be pretty shocked if it did run ‘badly’ in any way.
Bit more reading/thinking but thats my leaning right now.
I don’t think it takes complex masks to tank the performance. Any mask seems to impact it.
[quote="Lost_Manc, post:11, topic:52910”]
The M4 Pro should obviously be better in pure performance terms vs the Air, or you would at least hope so given the price difference!
[/quote]
When thinking about price difference between Air and Pro, remember it’s more than just basic performance. You also get:
Better sustained performance (the Air has only passive cooling so will throttle sooner).
A better screen.
Better speakers.
More ports.
Side note: I wonder why the forum is no longer properly formatting quotes after the first one.
Yes. I sort of alluded to this in my post but possibly not well enough!
Another point I had not initially considered was (in UK at least) the new M5’s no longer come with a wall plug for charging so would have been an additional, albeit small, cost as I am passing my old machine on to someone else who only needs basic use.
Anyway, all a moot point now. I picked up the M4 Pro earlier. Just need to find the time to set it up.
Regardless of anything else though it’ll still be a massive upgrade over my current setup old setup.
Next thing for me to figure out. Can I get PL5 to install and run or will it be out of date/unsupported for a clean install.
I’ll be trialing PL9 of course but would still like PL5 to run just in case. Suppose I will find out soon enough!
The Mac shipped with Sequoia and that’s only supported form PL6. Shame that.
Edit just to add. Installed PL5 anyway because why not(!). Appears to install but you can’t activate. Just does nothing. Didn’t expect it to work but had zero to lose.
See how I get on with the trial now.
I did study the quoted text in that post and could not see the issue. I’m just using the standard quoting mechanism of selecting the text and using the button that appears.
I can ‘break’ the quoting feature if the text that follows the quote starts on the same line as the [/quote] tag, e.g.
[quote=“zkarj, post:17, topic:52910”]
could not see the issue
[/quote] my text here
but that’s not how your post appears to be formatted. Somehow in your post the closing [/quote] tag is not being recognised.
I went back and checked my post. It had one line feed between the end tag and my text. I just edited it to put a clear line between them and it still doesn’t format it.
I’ve only been seeing this problem recently. Meanwhile, my compose box has changed to a pop-over with no preview, which will make it even harder to check on formatting! I wonder if there have been platform updates.
The forum was in maintenance mode for a short time recently and probably some defaults were reset. You may use the top left button in edit window to enable preview.