Shopping Quick Links Articles & Reviews Latest News

MPG Table of Contents   Page 1: Mac Pro Westmere Introduction Page 2: Which Mac Pro CPU for Photography, Video, Sound? Page 3: Mac Pro Westmere Clock Speed, Cores, and Cache Page 4: When More Is Less: Photoshop Slower With 12 Cores Than 6 Page 5: Mac Pro Westmere Estimating CPU Performance Page 6: Mac Pro Westmere Hits and Misses Page 7: Mac Pro Westmere Ordering Tips: What to Get and What to Skip Page 8: Mac Pro Westmere Solid State Drive Option Page 9: Mac Pro Westmere How Much Memory and Where to Buy Page 10: Mac Pro Westmere Value Compared to Quad-Core iMac Page 11: Mac Pro Westmere Internal SATA Bandwidth Page 12: Mac Pro Westmere Test Machine Configuration Page 13: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydSpeed1 Page 14: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydMedium Page 15: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydHuge Page 16: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop CS5 Panorama (Auto Align and Auto Blend) Page 17: Mac Pro Westmere Digital Camera RAW File Processing Speed (Bibble Pro) Page 18: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with Adobe Lightroom 3 Page 19: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with PhaseONE CaptureONE Page 20: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with Apple Aperture 3 Page 21: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Processing with Canon Digital Photo Professional Page 22: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Processing with Nikon Capture NX2 Page 23: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with PhotoZoom Pro Page 24: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Helicon Focus Page 25: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with PTGui Pro Page 26: Mac Pro Westmere XCode C++ Build Page 27: Mac Pro Westmere Real World Memory Bandwidth Page 28: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Apple Logic Studio Page 29: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Adobe After Effects Page 30: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Handbrake Video Encoding Page 31: Mac Pro Westmere Cinebench CPU and GPU Page 32: Mac Pro Westmere Conclusions

Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with Adobe Lightroom 3

See test machine configuration.

This is Import with max quality 1:1 previews.

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.

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.