I’m thinking of replacing my iMac Pro (base model 10-core Xeon W, 32gb RAM) with the new Mac Studio (M1 Ultra, 20Core CPU, 28Core GPU, 64GB Ram).
But I’m wondering just how much improvement I might see in a LRT / LR workflow.
Since nobody’s tested it yet, the question is of course fairly academic, but I am interested in your thoughts. I guess another way to ask the question is: in a typical timelapse workflow where are the bottlenecks? Is it largely CPU, or drive speed, for example? My problem is that my current iMac Pro is already pretty fast, but there are definitely times where I sit around and wait.
Current iMac Pro benchmarks
Single Core CPU: 1,065
Multi Core CPU: 7,980
Mac Studio Ultra (leaked, but believed to be accurate)
Single Core CPU: 1,793
Multi Core CPU: 24,055
I mean, on paper it’s a much faster computer (especially multi-core), and the ssd is theoretically 2x speed of my iMac Pro.
Hmmm…
I’d appreciate input.
The M1 architecture is quire efficient, I have a M1 Max here with 10 cores, and it's quite fast for a laptop, doesn't reach my Threadripper Workstation, but for a laptop it's impressive.
Lightroom Classic takes profit from the M1 architecture and LRTimelapse and DNG Converter also do, there is a native version of LRT6 for the silicon architecture. This means, the LRTimelapse workflow takes huge profit from the M1 architecture.
But I believe, the architecture itself brings the advantage. Even the simplest Mac Mini runs very efficiently with M1. But I think after that, it doesn't scale that well - this means it doesn't pay out proportionally investing twice, three times or four times the money on the bigger machines.
If you are on Mac, go for the M1, but I don't think it needs to be the biggest one. The problem with apple is that the prices for upgrades are unrealistic and don't scale in a fair way.
Today I would be buying the M1 Pro instead of the Max, the differences are negligible especially for Photo and Timelapse, which take profit of CPU cores, but not so much of GPU cores as opposed to video editing.
Gunther, thank you, and I believe you, more or less ;-)
I do wonder though, since the Ultra Architecture is literally just 2 M1 chips stuck together, and therefore containing twice the # of cores as the Pro, wouldn't that take the various compute threads (used by LRTimelapse or Lightroom), and spread them out over twice the number of cores, cutting the time in half? I know that's an over simplistic way to think of it, but double the cpu cores must have a significant effect on the overall workflow, yes? Or is LRT mostly benefitting from the performance of single-core? thanks!!
I have not heard anything about the "ultra" macs (didn't care) - but if you double the amount of CPU (!) cores on an intel pc, then multithreaded software like Lightroom and LRTimelapse will be able to use the double amount of parallel threads which significantly increases performance.
So yes, this might be a difference to the current M1 computers, where the scaling mostly happens on the GPU side and the nuber of CPU cores doesn't vary so much.
I have both Mac Studio with M1 Ultra 20 core CPU and MacBook Pro with M1 Max 10 core CPU. LRTimelapse visual preview performance is weird in Mac Studio. I did a test on them and my old 2017 iMac Pro with 8 core Xeon CPU as well. The test was taken on 300 DJI Mavic 3 20Megapixel DNG files, export 16 bit tif file and render to Prores 422 full resolution video.
The setting of Number of parallel of visual preview creation (threads) affects the total processing time dramatically on Mac Studio. The best performance is 8 threads, this is weird because there are 16 performance core and 4 efficient core in Mac Studio. I think maybe LRTimelapse was optimized for M1 Max which has 8 performance core. I calculated the processing time per picture per thread. When less than 10 threads, both M1 Max and M1 Ultra have a const performance at about 1.7s per thread per picture. But when set more than 10 threads on M1 Ultra, the process time could drop as low as 22s pre thread per picture.
For Lightroom export and LRTimelapse render video, M1 Ultra is almost about twice performance as M1 Max, just as expected. But for visual preview performance, maybe we need some optimize on LRTimelapse. Right now with 8 thread the total visual preview time is 64s, I would expect 32s for 16 thread after optimized.
Compare to 8 core iMac Pro, M1 Max is about 20% better performance on both LRTimelapse visual preview and Lightroom exporting.
Multithreading does not just scale 1:1 with the number of cores. Every processor architecture is different. And every Software also. There is always a certain overhead for managing all those threads. Especially LRTimelapse does quite some advanced stuff to get the Visual Previews and internal Export done as fast as possible via DNG Converter, which doesn't officially offer such interfaces. So basically it makes a difference, if Lightroom offers a native multithreading or if LRTimelapse needs to launch multiple instances of Adobe DNG Converter in parallel to achieve the task.
The LRTimelapse Multithreading is quite powerful (and was working way before Adobe even thought of implementing Multithreading in Lightroom) as you can see with the internal export.
I only have a Mac M1 Max here for testing and performance is impressive. I don't have a "Ultra". As I said before, the mac Multiprocessing works a bit different from the linear scaling on intel platforms.
On any multiprocessing the will always be a "peak" in parallel processes where you get the maximum performance, before it drops again because the overhead will be higher that the performance gain due to parallelization.
One thing that I could think about is that currently LRTimelapse does a 100ms delay between launching the visual preview threads in order to shift the parallelization a bit, this helps on slower machines. I could imagine that with high performance setups like yours this might be a bottleneck which could be the reason for what you are experiencing.
Would you be willing to test for me, if that's the case? Then I'd send you a special test version. Please send me an email to support(at)lrtimelapse.com
Hello, Does it mean that i need to change my computers ? Like Adobe told me for a lightroom upgrade ?
I don't think buying M1 stuff. I am sticking to a 2018 mac mini or my AMD® Ryzen pc.
The new lrtimelapse worth the upgrade ?
I think Lightroom is so slow and the real problem in the workflow. I like the fact to get ride of it in the new version...
You don't need to change computers. LRTimelapse will run on any PC or Mac. This is a special thread about the new M1 Ultra which obviously doesn't have to concern you.
And yes, the new LRTimelapse is worth the upgrade. Please check out what's new:
https://lrtimelapse.com/news/lrtimelapse-6/
Lightroom is quite fast in the latest version on decent hardware.
hi, I bought the version 6 and now i am looking for pc configuration that i could carry with meon planes like a macmini.. If you have tips ?