Photoshop CS6 Performance — 36MP RAW to 16-bit TIF
2012 Mac Mini 2.3 GHz quad-core, 16GB OWC memory, 240GB OWC Extreme Pro 6G SSD.
The 3.33 GHz 12-core Mac Pro is my upgraded unit; Apple’s fastest 12-core offering is 3.06 GHz, about 10% slower.
This test batch converts one hundred (100) Nikon D800 14-bit lossless-compressed NEF files to 16-bit uncompressed TIF.
This conversion is a computation intensive process, but because the resulting TIF files are 108MB each, disk I/O speed is a significant factor.
Observe that the use of an 240GB OWC Extreme Pro 6G SSD in the Mac Mini provides a very significant speedup over the stock Apple hard drive (MBP Retina used the Apple 512GB SSD, the other Macs also used OWC SSDs).
Using the OWC Mercury Helios + Accelsior PCIe SSD drops the time even a little more; this is the fastest setup and it is bootable (no driver required, just works).
The 2.3 GHz MacMini was tested; the 2.6 GHz model speed is estimated as the ratio of (2.3 / 2.6) the elapsed time. Past testing has shown this to be a reliable approach, but the time might be a little slower than estimated due to disk I/O influence as a percentage of run time.
Voigtlander MACRO APO-LANTHAR 65mm f/2 Aspherical Lens for Sony E
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