DENOISE AI IN CAMERA RAW

Is it the base M1? Then it will be somewhat slower that current Macs, but 1 minute is not bad in the big picture. (Computers over a few years old can take several minutes per image for AI Denoise, up to half an hour for some models.)

Here’s what we know: AI Denoise is totally dependent on GPU performance. The GPU in Apple Silicon Macs is pretty good, as long as it has enough memory. An Apple Silicon GPU shares memory with macOS (that’s why they call it Unified Memory). So the next question is, how much Unified Memory does the Mac have?

If it has 8GB of Unified Memory, there is a chance that the system does not have enough free memory to give to the GPU, and that could make AI Denoise slower. (Although 8GB works, 16GB or more is recommended according to the System Requirements.)

If it is slow and the Mac has 16GB or more of Unified Memory, there may be too much memory being used by other applications, so try and quit some.

About the comparison with DxO PureRaw: I haven’t used it, but it is known that currently, Adobe AI Denoise is significantly slower than some competing AI noise reduction applications. There are several ways to look at this:

• “I need speed, so I will use the other application instead of AI Denoise.” 
• “AI Denoise is slower, but the results are better, and I think it’s worth the wait so I will use AI Denoise and wait.” (Some people do think AI Denoise looks better, others disagree.) 
• “In case Adobe finds ways to optimize AI Denoise for performance, I will keep using it and hope it gets faster in the future.” 
• “I prefer the results of AI Denoise, and I need speed now, so I will get a faster Mac.” (Recent Macs have many more GPU cores than the base M1 from 2020, and can process AI Denoise much faster.) 

Any of those can be a right answer, so pick one depending on your needs and budget.

More info: ArtIsRight does a lot of testing across Macs in his YouTube videos. The picture below is from his recent AI Denoise test. Notice where the 2020 base M1 processor (8 GPU cores) is: It’s the long red bar at the bottom of the graph, with a time of 1 minute 40 seconds for a 36MP raw file. And notice how much the time shortens with newer Macs: Compared to the base M1, the base M2 can finish in 2/3 the time, an M1 Pro (16 GPU cores) needs just 1/2 the time, and the most expensive Macs (up to 60 GPU cores) can bring that down to 1/4 to 1/5 the time of the base M1, or 4 to 5 times faster.

AI Denoise uses GPU power that was not common until the last couple of years, which is why it runs so much better on newer Mac/PC graphics hardware. If AI Denoise had come out in 2018 or so, it would have been slow on almost everything.

Denoise should do 20MP in ten to fifteen seconds on a recent GPU like the M1.

So apparently there's something in the GPU driver component in MacOS that stalls here. Post Help > System Info and maybe someone familiar with Mac can spot something (I'm not).