2013 Mac Pro: Photoshop CC Performance (diglloydSpeed1, diglloydMedium)

Get Mac Pro at B&H Photo. See also MPG’s computer gear wishlist as well as diglloyd-recommended performance packages for Mac Pro.

A big thanks to Other World Computing for loaning MPG the upgraded 2013 Mac Pro! Ditto for B&H Photo for loaning the 6-core Mac Pro. 64GB memory kit for 2013 Mac Pro provided by OWC.

Introduction

OWC offers more CPU options at a cost savings for upgrading the 2013 Mac Pro CPUand memory. The 8-core 3.3 GHz is one of several highly attractive options.

The diglloydSpeed1 benchmark measures core Photoshop operations, the stuff your author uses every day for professional photography: sharpening, resizing, inverting, etc. It is an in-memory benchmark, so memory limitations or scratch disk speed are not a factor for any reasonably configured machine.

Results

See the test machine configurations.

With four fewer cores and the same base clock speed, the 8-core 2013 Mac Pro shows a consistent ~37% reduction in run time versus the 12-core 2010 Mac Pro Westmere.

Wow! This is core functionality with a very nice speed boost sure to please anyone who spend hours working in Photoshop.

The 6-core 3.5 GHz Mac Pro is only ~7% / 10% slower here than the 8-core 3.33 GHz. This represents a really excellent price performance, and note that— a 3.0 GHz 8 core would likely be beaten by the 6-core.

The 12-core 2013 Mac Pro with D700 GPUs fares respectably well here, but lags both the 6 and 8 core machines.

It’s unclear if the MacBook Pro suffered from its 16GB maximum memory.

2013 Mac Pro performance: Photoshop CC diglloydSpeed1 benchmark