Mac M1 Pro performance in Lightroom Classic

I’ve seen a number of non specific quotes about how efficient and fast Lightroom is on a Mac, but I’ve had difficulty finding real numbers. So I decided to run a test, my PC against my boss’s M1 based Macbook. Special thanks for Frank for taking the time … Here are the belligerents in the battle:

In the first corner:
Dell Precision 3640
64G memory
kxg60znv512g kioxia NVME M2
Core i7 10700@ 3.8GHZ 8core hyperthreaded Circa Q22020
NVIDIA 1070Ti 551.61 drivers
Adobe Lightroom Classic 13.2 RAW 16.2 with the GPU acceleration fully enabled
Windows 11 22H2

In the second corner is:
14-inch MacBook Pro Circa October 2021
Apple M1 Pro with 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
16GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage
MacOS: Sonoma Version 14.2.1
Lightroom:  13.2 Build[202402141005-bf1aeb84]
Camera Raw 16.2

For the test I decided to do three experiments, the same images were used on both machines and are Canon RAW files.

First a simple denoise using Adobe’s built in function. On the PC this took 71 seconds, on the Mac 36 seconds, 51% of the time of the PC …

Test two took two images, applied a subject mask inverted, adjusted the background, applied a subject mask and adjusted the subject. Then copied this and applied it to a second image. On the PC this took 6 seconds, on the Mac 3, pretty much, again ~50% of the PC …

Lastly we are simply going to export the images to local … I chose this because I had seen a number of early results saying Macs sucked here … On the PC this took 16 seconds, on the Mac 8 seconds.

Now I have to say, I am positively shocked. Now neither machines are brand new, but are roughly equally old. I have no idea if the M3 based system might be even faster, but I have little expectation that a faster PC would be anything more than marginally faster. Watching perfmon on the PC says these operations are heavily using the NVIDA GPU. The 1070Ti is by no means high end, there are a LOT faster cards.