Participating Frequently

질문

Fastest computer configuration for Photoshop LARGE FILES

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 21, 2022
5 답변들
11464 조회

I'm upgrading to a Mac Studio and would love some advice. In Photoshop I make huge bill board size composites that include hundreds of layers Filesizes = 20GB ++. (Corrected by moderator after remark of user)PEC

Some have suggested that an M1 Ultra chip does not make a difference over M1 Max for photoshop? And that getting more than the basic 10 cores is overkill.

If this is true, it looks like the fastest macbook pro offers the same speed as the basic Mac Studio....and then I could use the same machine when travelling.

I would love your input and ideas on how to maximize Photoshop performance, without spending unneccessary money.

I'm currently using a 27" imac pro with 32mb ram and 1tb ssd. it is too slow.

macOS

이 주제는 답변이 닫혔습니다.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

The internal storage (drives) on a Mac Studio are very fast, so just upgrade from the stock 512 TB to 2 TB or more when you order. The main thing is the included internal ssd(s) on the Mac Studio are very nearly always faster, by a substantial amount in most cases, than any external storage option and you want the fastest drives possible for scratch disk. That may change in the future, however, for whatever reason it seems external storage drives when connected to the Mac Studio do not achieve nearly the read/write speeds that the Mac Studio internal drives are capable of.

Of note, as of now, the internal Mac Studio ssd(s) are not user upgradable, even though they are removable.

Ram as well is not user upgradable.

samlarson작성자

Participating Frequently

Cool. since NVMe is not installable internally on a macstudio, I'm upgrading my external storage to NVMe. Would that make sense if it's not an internal drive? Would the thunderbolt cable reduce speed anyway?

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Thunderbolt 3 and 4 have a maximum theoretical throughput of 40 gigabits per second, which translates to 5000 megabytes per second. If you cut that down to a real world data rate (after overhead, other devices on the same bus, etc.) it might be around 2500–3500MB/sec. That’s the throughput of a lot of affordable NVMe SSDs, so if you buy one of those, you might get the speed you paid for.

The latest generations of NVMe, including the kind inside the Mac Studio, are about twice as fast as that, out to a theoretical 7000MB/sec. Thunderbolt currently can’t go that fast. So if you get an NVMe SSD for external use, you don’t need to buy the fastest type unless it’s no problem to afford it.

Would (NVMe) make sense if it's not an internal drive?
By @samlarson

Despite those limitations, it’s still worth using NVMe for an external drive. The reason is that if you don’t get NVMe, the alternative is SATA. The problem with SATA is that it tops out at only about 500–600MB/sec…less than 10% of the top speed of a Mac Studio internal SSD. For about the same price you can get what are now “low-end” NVMe SSDs with throughput of 800–950MB/sec if connected by USB 3, or over 2000MB/sec if connected by Thunderbolt 3/4.

D Fosse

Community Expert

RAM is more or less irrelevant for these file sizes. This will be all about the scratch disk! I routinely work with files up to 10 GB or so. It works splendidly with enough NVMe scratch disk space.

You need at least 1 TB free space on a fast NVMe, preferably PCIe 4.x, not 3.x. I'd go with 2 TB.

That's the one overriding concern. A fast CPU won't help much, and RAM will be merely a cache for the scratch disk. I don't think you'll notice much difference between 32, 64 or 128 GB. The scratch file will in any case be orders of magnitude bigger.

That said, this will also probably place some demands on the GPU. It should be a recent mid/high-end card.

Oh, and turn off all file compression! Save and open times will be unbearable with compression on!

(edit: I hope you're not under the misunderstood impression that this has to be 300 ppi at this size?)

samlarson작성자

Participating Frequently

Thank you! I definitely notice a difference when my ssd hard drive is full and the scratch disk becomes my external RAID. I don't think you can use NVMe with Mac Studio? Maybe there's a laptop you can use it on?

D Fosse

Community Expert

You don't have to use an NVMe; it's just that they are so much faster - so fast, in fact, that there's very little practical difference between RAM and scratch disk. No more scratch disk bottleneck.

In any case, that's several orders of magnitude faster than any external drive. You will notice that.

I'd recommend you go to work on your system drive, and do a radical cleanup. Move everything you can, delete as much as you can. There will be a lot of junk in your user account, that's where most of it accumulates. If you can clear 500 GB or so that's a good start, Set that as primary scratch and whatever else you have as secondary.

A "standard" configuration of OS and applications should't take up much more than 90-120 GB. The rest is potentially free space.

For Windows there is an excellent little utility called WinDirStat that shows you graphically what fills up your drives and where it is, in detail. There is a Mac equivalent, I just can't remember what it's called.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Some have suggested that an M1 Ultra chip does not make a difference over M1 Max for photoshop? And that getting more than the basic 10 cores is overkill.
By @samlarson

The reason is that if you look closely at the differences between the M1, M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra, there is really no major difference in the processor frequency. They are all more or less the same single-core speed. The main gains you get are in the number of cores and GPU power, and some other things that don’t apply to Photoshop such as hardware video encoders.

But in Photoshop you process just one image at a time, so that naturally limits how much use you can get out of lots of cores. Lots of cores are great when you need to push through lots of operations that are easy to parallelize, like rendering thousands of video frames, exporting hundreds of photos from Lightroom Classic, or rendering hundreds of vector objects and textures in a 3D application. But as a 2D photo editor, Photoshop just can’t put that many cores to work when you edit one document with some layers.

Yes, the current version of Photoshop does take more advantage of CPU and GPU cores than in the past, which is why Photoshop has a new Multithreaded Compositing setting in Preferences. That should help if your documents have many layers. But if you buy an M1 Ultra, Photoshop is still going to leave more CPU/GPU cores unused compared to what a video editor or 3D application are able to put to work. For large documents, you want more Unified Memory (probably at least 32GB) to make sure both Photoshop and the GPU have the memory they need for optimal performance, and must make sure there is lots of free space on the SSD you assign as Photoshop scratch.

Photoshop has been adding GPU acceleration to more areas, but again, not as many areas are GPU accelerated compared to video editing and 3D applications. So again, the benefit of upgrading to the more powerful GPU in the M1 Ultra may have only limited benefit in Photoshop.

Gains in processor frequency come with new generations of Apple Silicon. The M2 has somewhat faster single-core performance than the M1. But the M2 is currently available only as a basic consumer processor; Apple has not yet released M2 Pro, Max, or Ultra variants yet.

But all Apple Silicon Macs will probably feel faster than an Intel-based iMac, the Mac Studio should definitely feel faster.

PECourtejoie

Community Expert

One reason to opt for an Ultra chip is the increased maximum amount of RAM installable: 128GB instead of 64GB.

given the kind of files you work with (I have not seen if you replied to the questions about the resolution used in a billboard-sized file, given the viewing distance). Some user of huge files cut their images in part, then composite flattened versions together for the end product.