Export Speed / overall performance - Apple M Processors

M4s being used and still no progress on M-series. gotta jam in that AI that doesn't work, isn't usable for many end uses.

I agree, C1 needs some under the hood changes to better use the performance of modern machines. This is desperately needed., especially when compared to LR

Hi everyone, just making a note that this is on our minds and we are spending time on this. However at this stage, putting work in doesn't necessarily mean getting results so we cannot promise an improvement in the very short term.
When this changes, we will update the status of this idea and let you know :)

you are totally right. hopefully they will keep an eye on performance 

Having approx. 250k customers and the vast majority running Mac machines I really think they should put more effort into benchmarking, publishing results and specific recommendations, investigating and improving performance on a couple of inhouse Apple test machines. (I wouldn't expect the same for Windows machines as their are too many vendors and variations, though I am a Windows user myself).

Sorry the "excuses" was more in general. Nothing personally. For a better comparison, I now tested the “Raw Power” software and Apple Photos.

RAW Power: 14 min 39 sec.

Apple Photos: 14 min 01 sec.

it´s incredible how Lightroom CC reached this performance 

For what it's worth: I fully agree (your last post, and for the overall performance, not necessarily each and every detail), and my post did not contain any excuse.

When you are shooting 3000 files a day and your art director wants to take them for his layout at the same day after the production, you starting to invest in the most powerful hardware to mange these requirements. And when you feel no difference to your old hardware, you start to think about what’s going wrong. Capture one want’s to be super professional for the business. So as a paying customer, I want to get this professional support. I know nobody who works professionally with windows and capture one. Apple M existing since three years. So there was a lot of time to work on it… otherwise they should change their advertising to a consumer / hobby level. No excuses…

Your last screenshot, Stefan, looks to me as if both the CPU and GPU are being used.

Anyway, I doubt that the C1 processing pipeline has embedded "do nothing" instructions, so, at any time, some hardware components will be doing something, maybe copying some data from one register to another, or whatever. The same is certainly true for LR or any other batch processing software.
It just happens to be that we don't have a monitor application which shows us this "something" in a nice graphic, so we are focused on those parts of the process that we can observe, i.e. CPU and GPU utilization diagrams. There is also the question how these diagrams measure what they show (or what they actually show, and don't show, respectively).

There is always one step in every processing which is a bottleneck (weak link), i.e. the next step is waiting for the output of this bottleneck step, and is somewhat idle while waiting. In the end, the overall time is what counts, and the task for developers seeking to improve performance is to identify and rectify such bottlenecks. The problem is, this is very much dependent on the exact resources and their (performance) abilities (and other parameters (Fuji X, Canon, Nikon files, megapixels, etc.)) and this may vary between different hardware (M) models.

There is certainly also the aspect of how good C1 processing is tailored to parallel processing on that specific macOS hardware, for those operations which can theoretical be run in parallel, there might possibly be room for improvements.

And in comparison to other software, e.g. LR, the aspect of the implemented algorithms. In the end, I am looking at an image and I want it to look like a C1 processed image, unless performance is more relevant to me than how the image looks (which it isn't).

It would be good though if C1 (the company) would publish specific benchmarks, especially for the rather limited number of Apple hardware variations, or some of them, answering questions like "would process x (e.g. export, import, or slider movements)" benefit from more gpu cores, performance cores, main memory or whatever, under which parameters (e.g. camera files), and by how much?".

Only my personal view, everyone else's mileage may vary.

Really interesting the difference between your findings on the two applications, thank you!

Now I did the same export with Lightroom Classic (13.1.) and it was surprisingly slow.

It took 23 min 40 sec. which is similar the same as C1 but for the same result it used my computer more and seemed to block it more. CPU 60% GPU 65%

just to be sure I did the same export again with Lightroom CC -  6 min 34 sec. CPU 90% GPU 90%

and YES it makes a difference if you export with or without adjustments. These export times are without adjustments.

Just for completeness. I also tried Adobe Camera RAW which seemed to be like Lightroom Classic and Canon Photo Professional which was the worst.

So it's totally difficult to compare Adobe and Capture one.

Fact: Why doesn´t use Capture One CPU AND GPU for export? 

I used Lightroom CC and not classic. Maybe that’s the difference?

@BeO Yes! LrC would have edged out C1 by about 5 minutes total had it been able to run the full set. It would have (presumably) taken about 22 or 23 minutes vs ~28 for C1. Funny story, while I have a degree in mathematics, I'm actually horrible with real numbers :-). I obviously (and embarrassingly) need to revisit the results. Damaged ego aside, my particular takeaway was that any performance differences weren't massive one way or the other despite larger differences in GPU/CPU cores. The other takeaway was that yes, C1 can and should make better use of the resources. 

368407896237 It was whatever the current LrC was in Q4 last year.

Maybe your are right. The Canon R5 was released in mid-2020. so almost 4 years. If that made any difference, it would be just as embarrassing as the Apple M support.

Today I also tried auto adjustments for all files and C1 used 25% CPU and close to 0% GPU. So it seems to me a performance problem at all.

You are right, the versions matter.

Btw., what also matters (potentially) are the raw file formats.

I remember long ago, prior the takeover of mirrorless cameras, Canon raw files have had a different processing pipeline (in the C1 version of that time) than other cameras' raw files, and not every step in the processing pipeline was executed by the GPU and maybe not even in a parallel fashion, for Canon files. I think they were slower, but don't quote me on that.

Maybe such differences in the processing still persists with newer Canon file formats and C1 versions.

we should first know which Lightroom version. because i think his test results are much older than mine... otherwise it doesn´t make sense at all to talk about tests with old versions...

Hi Raymond,

For export scenario (2) ... Verdict: On my machine, in this scenario, C1 did a bit better. 

LR exports 0.9 images/second, C1 only 0.74, so shouldn't your verdict be the other way around?

Thank you for your test results. Which version of Lr did you used? The version I used yesterday had no import function anymore (or I didn’t found it) it was possible to browse through the folders and export directly without creating previews. So maybe Adobe worked on the performance since you did the test?

I totally bollocksed my test description above. My memory is obviously crap :-). This is what posted over in Paul Reiffer's FB group...pictures are over there if interested. Just search on my name and you'll find it.

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Apple MacBook Pro 16’
M3 Max
36GB RAM

Canon R5 CR3 RAW files located on the main drive.