Photoshop CS6 Performance — Auto Align Layers

2013-01-13 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: CPU cores, iMac, Macs, Photoshop

Test: Edit => Auto Align Layers on six 36-megapixel 16-bit layers.

The Photoshop CS6 Edit => Auto Align Layers is used to align different frames, such as when making a stitched panorama with multiple images overlapping each other.

Core usage

Auto Align Layers is multi-core aware for its first phase, but single threaded for its second phase of processing.

Since the first phase of Auto Align Layers is multi-core aware, additional CPU cores help for that phase. But the second phase is single-threaded (one CPU core), and there the fastest clock speed and most efficient (newer-generation) processor gain back time.

Results

The 12-core Mac Pro easily leads the pack here, with its extra cores gaining time on the first portion of the Auto Align Layers command, which is multi-core friendly.

The iMac’s fast clock speed and newer generation 4-core CPU are slightly faster than the 3.33 GHz 6-core Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro with Retina display, which does remarkably well here.

The number of CPU cores is a factor, and memory bandwidth might also be a factor here due to the large data size (multiple gigabytes).

Test run with OpenGL disabled; enabling OpenGL resulted in identical times.

Photoshop CS6 performance on Auto Align Layers
Late 2012 iMac 3.4