2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra: Zerene Stacker Focus Stacking

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MPG tested the $7999 Apple Mac Studio M1 Ultra 20-core CPU / 64-core GPU/ 128GB / 8TB SSD , provided on loan for review by B&H Photo, an authorized Apple Mac dealer. Please buy your gear at B&H Photo and OWC/MacSales.com using any link from this site.

About

2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra

For my photographic work, I use Zerene Stacker heavily for focus stacking and it takes minutes to do some stacks, so speed here matters. Zerene Stacker is not the fastest stacking software out there (see Helicon Focus results), but minimizing touchup work is far more important and that’s where Zerene Stacker shines by yielding results that minimize the need for retouching and my retouching time is far more important than the computer time.

Zerene Stacker is outstanding at using all CPU cores. Being Java-based, it does not use the GPU.

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Results

See for example Nikon D850 'Focus Shift shooting' feature for Easy Focus Stacking.

Zerene Stacker DMAP: focus stack 20 X 150 megapixel and 28 X 45 megapixel 16-bit TIF.

Test restuls for MBP M1 Max were with macOS 12.1 and an older non-optimized version of Zerene Stacker, yet the M1 Max results are much faster than the M1 Ultra!

The 2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra delivers a puzzling and disappointing performance, inferior to the 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max tested a few months prior. Something has changed. No M1 Max was available to retry the speed now.

53% slower than the 2019 Mac Pro.

This looks like a software issue. OTOH, the CPU scalability with Zerene Stacker shows that the 2019 Mac Pro achieves its dominance only past 20 CPU cores.

Focus stacking in Zerene Stacker
2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra vs others

2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra