I wish I could help you with an easy answer about how to speed things up, but with this kind of performance issue it would help me a lot if you could provide some more specific details. Can you quanitify what "slow" means for some specific operations I can try to repeat? Can you provide screen recordings that show what "slow," "glitchy" and "not smooth" look like? Do you have another Mac where performance doing the same things is "fast?" If so, what model is it and can you share examples to help me see better what you are doing and to quantify the speed difference? Are the problems you're seeing constant, easy for anyone to reproduce, or do they only happen sometimes?
How fast oeprations take in Camera Raw depend a lot on how much computation has to be done, and that depends a lot on the size of the photos, size of the image being displayed, and the complexity of the settings. We expect performance to scale up (get better) with faster hardware, but no matter how fast the comptuer I've been able to find or create test photos that are large enough, or have enough complex local edits that rendering still feels unresponsive. Please provide some sample files and settings, so I can use them to compare the performance I see with what you're experiencing.
Have you already tried to rule out some other external factors that commonly affect performance? Are other applications competing for resources (CPU, GPU, memory?) while you are trying to edit the photos? You can try using the Activity Monitor to find out. Try quitting all other apps before using Camera Raw. Does it make a difference? Is GPU acceleration turned off in Camera Raw's Performance preferences? Are you trying to read and write files on an external disk or over a network where the read and write speeds will be slower than the built in storage device?
I know you mentioned opening in Photoshop being slow, but something you may try is to use Photoshop instead of Bridge for other photo editing in Camera Raw. In their current versions, Photoshop runs nativly for Apple Silicon, but Bridge does not. (You can see this in Activity Monitor in the "Kind" column. Look for "Intel" or "Apple.") I've mesured it, and interactive performance is better in Photoshop-hosted ACR on an M1 Max machine right now because of this. That said I've also edited a lot of photos using Bridge on an M1 Max, and the difference is not always obvious for a lot of workflows.
Thanks for your patience,
David
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