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MPG Table of Contents   Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Which Mac Pro CPU for Photography, Video, Sound? Page 3: Clock Speed, Cores, and Cache Page 4: Estimating CPU Performance Page 5: Hits and Misses Page 6: Ordering Tips— What to Get and What to Skip Page 7: Solid State Drive Option Page 8: How Much Memory and Where to Buy Page 9: Value Compared to Quad-core iMac Page 10: Internal SATA Bandwidth Page 11: Test Machine Configuration Page 12: Photoshop Performance — diglloydSpeed1 Page 13: Photoshop Performance — diglloydMedium Page 14: Photoshop Performance — diglloydHuge Page 15: Photoshop CS5 Panorama (Auto Align and Auto Blend) Page 16: Digital Camera RAW File Processing Speed Page 17: Digital Camera RAW File Processing Speed — Bibble Pro Page 18: Performance with PhotoZoom Pro Page 19: Performance with Helicon Focus Page 20: Performance with PTGui Pro Page 21: Real World Memory Bandwidth Page 22: Performance with Apple Logic Studio Page 23: Performance with Adobe After Effects Page 24: Performance with Handbrake Video Encoding Page 25: Cinebench CPU and GPU Page 26: Conclusions

Apple Mac Pro (August 2010) —
Digital Camera RAW File Processing Speed

See test machine configuration.

Many dollars and hours of free time died to bring you this information— please use one of my links to get your Mac Pro, thank you.

The 2010 Mac Pro 3.33GHz 6-core is a “sweet spot” compared to previous machines and compares very favorably to the 2009 8-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro and the 12-core 3.33GHz model.

More cores help, but 6 cores falls far short of being 50% faster than 4 cores. Even BibblePro was only 20% faster with 6 cores vs 4 cores.

A lot more money buys somewhat more performance. But keep total system cost in mind.

While the 2.93GHz 8-core 2009 model is a modest 8% faster for Lightroom then the 3.33GHz hexacore, it’s actually slower in other cases.

The 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz Mac Pro 2010 Nehalem models were not tested. The 3.2Ghz model should approach the speeds of the 2009 3.33GHz 4-core model.

• Capture NX2 processed lossless-compresssed 14-bit 24MP NEF files from the Nikon D3x. All other converters processed 21MP CR2 files from the Canon 5D Mark II. • Lightroom and Aperture timed for Import, all other converters processed RAW to 16-bit uncompressed TIF output.

RAW converter performance

These tests were run with a dual SSD RAID-0 stripe capable of ~ 500MB/sec, so that disk I/O is a non-factor.

Graphs can be clicked to view a larger version.

Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Import (Camera RAW 6.1/6.2)

Lightroom performs very well in absolute terms, but note that at 3.33Ghz, the difference between the 4-core and 6-core models is only 11%—not the 50% one would hope for.

Results were re-tested with Lightroom version 3.2 and ACR 6.2 — no change.

I couldn’t believe that Lightroom would not benefit from 12 cores, so I ran and re-ran the test only to be sorely disappointed. Is there a hard-coded limit on cores, or a bug? And why does the 8-core 2.93GHz model beat the new faster models?

I observed similar results exporting TIF files.

Apple Aperture 3.0.3 Import

Aperture performance is slightly slower than Lightroom 3. Results are about 1/3 slower if the face detection setting is enabled.

Note that 12 cores is only 8% faster than 6 cores— Aperture does not scale.

Bibble Pro 5.1g — convert to 16-bit uncompressed TIF

See the Bibble Pro page.

Bibble Pro is the highest-performing RAW converter.

PhaseOne Capture One Pro 5.1.2 — convert to 16-bit uncompressed TIF

Note that 12 cores is 31% faster than 6 cores— a significant benefit, especially compared to the dismal scalability of the other RAW converters. Kudos to PhaseOne.

Canon Digital Photo Professional 3.8.2.0 — convert to 16-bit uncompressed TIF

Canon Digital Photo Professional makes poor use of more than 3 cores.

However, by manually starting multiple batch workers, look at the huge gain possible on the 12-core!

Nikon Capture NX2 2.2.4 — convert to 16-bit uncompressed TIF

The perennial performance sluggard in the RAW-file conversion space, Nikon Capture NX2 2.2.4 is unbearable slow. Version 2.2.5 is not any better.

The 12-core model is slower than the 6-core model, no surprise given the thread-contention problems in Capture NX2.

CPU core usage

See Monitoring system performance with Activity Monitor. Black areas are idle, red and green are usage.

There are real hardware cores, and also virtual cores (hyperthreading). Full use of all virtual cores is not necessarily needed for max performance, but unless all hardware cores are utilized, speed goes untapped.

Bibble Pro 5.1g

The best performer is BibblePro 5.1G. It also runs about 3X faster than Lightroom 3! It also maxes-out things when previewing. So it’s efficient and fast, a very impressive performer.

There is probably a ton of headroom in Bibble Pro such that a 12-core machine could be highly effective. However, it’s already so much faster than the competition that the 6-core Mac Pro should prove highly satisfactory for most everyone.

Adobe Lightroom 3

Lightroom 3 does a very good job on a 4-core or 6-core machine, but a lot of CPU cores remain idle on a 12-core machine. Only about half of the 12 cores on a 12-core system are used.

Phase One CaptureONE Pro

PhaseONE CaptureONE Pro does a very good job, but CPU cores are not fully used.

Apple Aperture 3

Aperture 3 is not using the available CPU cores as well as it ought to.

Canon Digital Photo Professional

Canon DPP is not using the available CPU very well, perhaps 1/3 of potential at most. But it is possible to run two batch jobs in parallel, which can soak up more cores.

Nikon Capture NX2 v2.2.4

Marginal CPU core usage, very “spiky”, so a fast CPU clock speed is most important.