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2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max: diglloyd Adobe Photoshop Benchmarks
Related: 2019 iMac 5K, 2019 Mac Pro, 2020 iMac 5K, 4K and 5K display, Apple MacBook Pro M1, Apple Silicon, iMac, iMac 5K, laptop, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Macs, memory, Photoshop, video
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MPG tested the Apple 16.2" MacBook Pro with M1 Max Chip Z14X000HR, a maxed-out model in all ways except 4TB SSD instead of the maximum 8TB SSD.
About
These four benchmarks test the speed of Photoshop with different size workloads.
The amount of memory has a major influence on the diglloydLarge and diglloydHuge tests, but all the tested systems here had ample memory for all but diglloydHuge, where the MacBook Pro is at a disadvantage and yet performs the best.
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diglloydSpeed1
The diglloyd Speed1 benchmark uses a mix of the most commonly used Photoshop operations with a file size that allows everything to stay in memory. Hence it accurately represents what one might expect in everyday use of Adobe Photoshop CC. Specialty operations such as Liquify and other GPU-intensive tasks are just that—specialty, and are not included in this suite.
The MacBook Pro M1 Max stuns, with all the other systems taking at least 40% to 56% longer.
diglloydMedium
The diglloyd Medium benchmark uses a mix of the core Photoshop operations with a moderately larger file size that exceeds what most users are likely to use, taking about 15GB of memory usage in Photoshop. This puts it right on the edge of what a Mac with 16GB of memory can manage.
The MacBook Pro M1 Max stuns, with all the other systems taking at least 43% to 93% longer.
diglloydLarge
The diglloyd Large Photoshop benchmark uses a mix of the core Photoshop operations with a large file size that exceeds what most users are likely to use, using about 30GB of memory in Photoshop.
The MacBook Pro M1 Max stuns, with all the other systems taking at least 40% to 96% longer.
diglloydHuge
The diglloyd Huge benchmark uses a mix of the core Photoshop operations with a file size that requires about 56GB of memory usage in Photoshop, far beyond what most users are likely to encounter.
The Mac Pro had 384GB memory and the iMac each had 128GB—ample for this test.
The MacBook Pro M1 Max surprises, with all the other systems taking at least 25% to 95% longer.
I was surprised with these results: in spite of having only 64GB of system memory and Photoshop needing 56GB for most efficient execution (80% memory allocation limited it to 51GB), the MacBook Pro M1 Max still handily beats the Intel-based Macs. WOW! With more memory, maybe it would drop to 16 seconds or so.
