Poor performance on Macbook Pro M1 with LrC and Ps

[Taipalus]

I had to return my base model Macbook Pro M1 8Gb, because it was unusable for real work on LrC and Ps. Both apps run in Rosetta, and they're stuttery, laggy, slow. Things like switching between two photos in LrC Develop module, or just selecting the crop tool could take up to ten seconds to load up. Adjustment sliders were very unresponsive. Photoshop could freeze for seconds when simply selecting a layer. Brush would freeze and lag constantly. I've never seen the beachball so often. Wacom tablet would lag worse and worse the more workload you would put on Photoshop. This seems crazy but it's faster for me to work on my mid 2012 i5 MBP than the M1.

After watching so many rave reviews that among other things praised how well Adobe apps run in Rosetta, I was dumbfounded. I thought there was something wrong with my unit. After running every possible performance benchmark software I could find, I got exactly the same scores that all the reviewers did online. I can't imagine how that could be possible if I had a faulty unit. All I can think of is that none of the reviewers I saw had actually put the M1 through a proper practical test in LrC and Ps. Maybe the swap memory is not as fast as everyone says it is, because all of the performance issues I had were typical lag behavior due to insufficient RAM.

Posted this issue to discussions.apple as well.

[Tony_See]

Quote

"Rosetta 2 works in the background whenever you use an app built only for Mac computers with an Intel processor. It automatically translates the app for use with Apple silicon.

In most cases, you won't notice any difference in the performance of an app that needs Rosetta. But you should contact the app developer to inquire about a version that can natively use the full power and performance of Apple silicon."

I'm wondering if you have been down this rabbit hole and contacted the app developer yet?

[Taipalus]

I have not. I thought it would be useless, because I was convinced by the benchmarks that the computer itself was working properly, and also reinstalling and rolling back to all available versions of LrC and Ps, I saw no difference in performance. I came to the conclusion that this is the current state of M1, Rosetta and Intel versions of Adobe apps. But I might be totally wrong, and there could have been some error I just didn't figure out. I thought I'd post here in case others are experiencing the same thing.

[Jao vdL]

Might be a return of the zombie bug with WACOM tablets. Every few versions extreme Lightroom slowdowns owing to Wacom drivers returns. I would uninstall the drivers and disconnect the tablet to test.

Tried Classic on a 16GB model M1 MacBook Air a few days ago and it was incredibly fast. Felt a lot faster than my current tricked out last year's i9 Mac Book Pro. And the lack of fan noise was wonderful. Something is not right with your setup.

[Taipalus]

Thanks! I never considered it could be Wacom. Seems odd that it could slow down Lightroom in the situations that I mentioned above, even when not using the tablet, but who knows. I did notice that when I had Google Backup and Sync app syncing in the backgound, it made the Wacom lag really bad. Instant fix (to just a slight lag) when I shut it down.

I will get a different M1 Mac soon, so I will follow up here when I get everything running.