Windows PC better than comparable Mac at content creation with Lightroom

[Quartz-1]

Lightroom Mac vs PC Speed Test | $4k iMac vs $4k Custom PC Performance Test

TLDR:

PERFORMANCE CONCLUSION

While we really appreciate Apple’s approach to their hardware quality and design, we can’t justify the price to performance difference at this time.

Speaking conservatively, a 25% difference in performance would turn an 8 hour wedding edit into 10 hours. Spread across 30 weddings a year (for a typical studio), this is a 60 hour time difference in the time spent editing weddings. For a studio like ours shooting nearly 400+ weddings, a 25% difference would require 800 more hours of editing or nearly 20 weeks of productivity.

In this Mac vs. PC test, our results showed that the Apple iMac was behind by 35% or more across the board, making the PC the clear victor.

 

[acquacow]

My lightroom setup is super optimized... My catalog, cache, previews, camera raw cache, and photos all live on separate SSDs. Most of my SSDs are PCI-e at that with 2GB+/sec read speeds.

I can't add those kinds of things to most mac setups unfortunately...

I tried keeping everything on one fast SSD, but the disk queue depths and iowait would start to climb during large batches. Made it very slow to work on photos while Lightroom was exporting or importing anything else in the background.

 

[modi123]

Blah, blah numbers.. yada, yada performance.. That's all fine and dandy, but you can't put a price on the amount of smug generated by using a Mac.

 

[heatlesssun]

Yeah, I don't think even but the most diehard Mac folks would ever argue that PCs have a higher performance to price ratio. Nothing really new here.

 

[defaultluser]

And don't even get started on the other half of the equation: anything GPU-accelerated will be at least 40% faster on Windows due to crappy drivers:

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-MacBook.011.png

Compare Manhattan, Trex is much simpler and probably CPU-limited (on these slow m-series 5w processors)

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-MacBook.006.png

Same exact HD 515, just a different OS. And this matters on OS X because the vast majority of machines sold use Intel integrated graphics (in some form).

This even holds true for the Mac Pro, which scores 60% faster on Windows with the exact same Cinebench run (Windows 8.1 versus OS X on same machine).

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/mac-pro-2014.0011.png

 

[B00nie]

My lightroom setup is super optimized... My catalog, cache, previews, camera raw cache, and photos all live on separate SSDs. Most of my SSDs are PCI-e at that with 2GB+/sec read speeds.

I can't add those kinds of things to most mac setups unfortunately...

I tried keeping everything on one fast SSD, but the disk queue depths and iowait would start to climb during large batches. Made it very slow to work on photos while Lightroom was exporting or importing anything else in the background.

Thunderbolt works wonders in any late model.

 

[x509]

My lightroom setup is super optimized... My catalog, cache, previews, camera raw cache, and photos all live on separate SSDs. Most of my SSDs are PCI-e at that with 2GB+/sec read speeds.

I can't add those kinds of things to most mac setups unfortunately...

I tried keeping everything on one fast SSD, but the disk queue depths and iowait would start to climb during large batches. Made it very slow to work on photos while Lightroom was exporting or importing anything else in the background.

I'm just getting started with Lightroom and Is'm interested in the details of your setup. Agree with you about Macs not being as expandable.

My system has 32 GB of RAM, which Photoshop can certainly use, but not so much with Lightroom. Can you suggest how I might use say 8 to16 GB of RAM to improve Lightroom performance.

You may have heard of the recent announcement from On1 Software of their upcoming entirely new RAW convertor. Among other claims is that it will do imports much faster than Lightroom.

x509