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2019 Mac Pro: diglloyd Adobe Photoshop Benchmarks
Related: 2019 iMac 5K, 2019 Mac Pro, 2019 MacBook Pro, 4K and 5K display, AMD Radeon GPU, AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48, bandwidth, GPU, iMac, iMac 5K, laptop, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Macs, memory, Photoshop, video
MPG tested the $9399 Apple 2019 Mac Pro with 384GB OWC memory vs the top-end $3849 2019 iMac 5K 3.6 GHz Intel Core i9 8-core / Vega 48 with 128GB OWC memory. The memory difference is not a factor in this test.
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Introduction
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 both machines have ample amounts for all the tests on this page.
More important is memory bandwidth. There is a lot of data to move around in several of these tests. The iMac 5K may be impaired by its dual-channel memory, versus 6-channel memory of the Mac Pro, which has 3.6X the bandwidth.
Results: 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 2019 Mac Pro edges out the 2019 iMac 5K by about 10%.

Results: 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, which is no sweat for a 64GB laptop.
The 2019 Mac Pro beats the 2019 iMac 5K by about 21%.

Results: 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 2019 Mac Pro beats the 2019 iMac 5K by about 18%.

Results: 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 2019 Mac Pro beats the 2019 iMac 5K by about 31%.
There is a lot of data to move around here—the iMac 5K may be impaired by its dual-channel memory, versus 6-channel memory of the Mac Pro, which has 3.6X the bandwidth.
