27.8 - On-device remove tool is much slower than cloud

Hi ​@grizzlyrent,

Thanks for the detailed bug report, including the specific timing comparisons and the steps you've already tried. I looked into this, and I would like to share some context about what you're experiencing. About your hardware and the on-device model:

The on-device Remove Tool model has significant computational demands. On Mac, the recommended system requirements from the Product team specify Apple Silicon M1 Max or higher (with M4 Max recommended) for the remove tool, along with a minimum of 24 GB of RAM and macOS Tahoe 26. Your M1 Pro, while a powerful chip, sits below the M1 Max tier in terms of GPU core count and memory bandwidth, both of which directly impact on-device AI inference speed.
 

Your 32 GB of RAM and macOS Tahoe 26.5.2 meet the other requirements, and I can see that you have GPU acceleration enabled and are running natively on Apple Silicon. However, the M1 Pro's GPU has 16 cores, compared with the M1 Max's 32, resulting in significantly longer inference times for the on-device model. The performance gap you're seeing (~6s Cloud vs. ~15s Device for a single removal) is consistent with what we've observed from prerelease testers on hardware at or near the boundary, even on fully supported M1 Max systems. Initial on-device processing can be slower than the cloud.
 

This means the performance difference you're experiencing is largely expected, given the M1 Pro's GPU throughput relative to the on-device model's demands.
 

Some things I'd like you to check:

• Remove Tool Processing mode: Go to Settings > Image Processing > Remove Tool Processing > is this set to "Faster or Stable"?

• You mentioned 8 outlets take "several minutes." Is the per-object time getting progressively worse (e.g., 1st outlet = 15s, 5th outlet = 30s, 8th outlet = 60s+)? Or is it a consistent ~15s per removal that adds up? This distinction helps us understand whether there's a memory accumulation issue on top of the baseline hardware constraint.

• While the Remove Tool is processing on-device, could you open Activity Monitor and check whether the GPU usage spikes or whether CPU usage is high instead? If the processing is unexpectedly running on the CPU rather than the Neural Engine/GPU, that would indicate a different issue than raw hardware throughput.

Also worth noting: Photoshop 27.9.1 & macOS 26.6.1 were recently released with bug fixes. If you haven't updated to that yet, it's worth trying.
 

Looking forward to your answers on the above.

Best,
Anshul Saini