Advice on Buying Mac Studio

If you are understand how the various specs affect working with multiple layers and composting in general

By @pellec20805666

That Photo Taco article is pretty good, although it isn’t specific to Photoshop. Also, your documents sound so large that it probably puts you above the category of “most photographers” that he talks about.

For Photoshop, it more or less breaks down like this:

• CPU cores: This is an area in transition. Photoshop did not make the most of all CPU cores in the past, but Adobe has been modernizing the application. For example, a new Multithreaded Compositing preference became available only this year, and that should improve multiple layers and compositing on CPUs with lots of cores, like the Mac Studio.
• GPU cores: Also in transition. Traditionally not a lot of Photoshop has been GPU-accelerated, but recently more areas are, including compositing. But having the most powerful GPU still does not yet benefit Photoshop as much as it would a video editor, 3D editor, or game. The Mac Studio GPU should be powerful enough for a while.
• Unified Memory: The 64GB you are ordering is probably the minimum you will need because you said you edit documents with so many layers. Keep in mind that GPU memory comes out of Unified Memory, so if you are doing something that wants 8GB graphics memory, you really have roughly 56GB + 8GB. Which is enough for most things. As Photoshop adds GPU acceleration to more areas of the application, or if you attach multiple 4K+ displays, the GPU might use more Unified Memory.
• Storage: You did not mention how much internal storage you ordered. If you don’t plan to attach external SSDs, then internal storage must be large enough for normal storage plus enough room for all temporary scratch/cache files that applications and macOS will create. Specifically the Photoshop scratch file. If your Photoshop files really do have “up to a thousand” layers and masks, it might be tight with only 1TB total storage if there will be less than 200–400 GB free. But 1TB internal storage might be OK if you also have a Photoshop scratch disk configured as at least 1TB external storage on an SSD (preferably connected through 10Gbps USB 3 or faster).

A lot of those “it doesn’t take full advantage” reasons are why paying twice the price for an M1 Ultra Mac Studio does not usually get you twice the performance in Photoshop.

Overall trend: Because Photoshop is only part of the way to taking full advantage of the power of current hardware, don’t be surprised if you get the new computer and say “hmm, that’s nice but it seems like it should be faster than this.” The future trend is that as Adobe continues to modernize more areas of the application and use more of the available CPU and GPU power, Photoshop will hopefully run faster on the same M1 Max Studio over the next few years. But we users don’t know exactly how that will play out.

When it comes to the new Macs including the Studio I would go big or look elsewhere. Attempting to upgrade after purchase is a huge hassle and in cases of the M1 Mini - impossible.

we've been working with files that large for decades on much lesser machines, so buy as much as you can afford and there won't be any issues