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Sadly going to return my MacBook M5

D

devonroadie

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Last week I bought a new MacBook Pro M5 with 24gb memory and 1TB hard disc.

I used lightroom a lot for editing raw 45mp files and particularly use AI features in it like de-noise.

I was hoping the MacBook would be faster than my 2 year old basic air, but it still takes around 45 seconds to de-noise a photo in lightroom which is only very slightly longer.

This was a £2k machine, how much more would I have to spend to get a MacBook Pro which is significantly faster for processing these files?

Sadly I think I will be returning this
 
devonroadie said:
was hoping the MacBook would be faster than my 2 year old basic air, but it still takes around 45 seconds to de-noise a photo in lightroom which is only very slightly longer.
Click to expand...
Interesting, I wonder why.

Are the NPU counts the same between your 2 year old MBA and and current MBP? What model MBA exactly do you have, M2, M3?
 
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I wonder if the Pro is still doing some kind of indexing tasks or something. If you go into Activity Monitor when you’re not doing anything, do you see a lot of activity?

I don’t use Lightroom myself, but I would think the M5 Pro with 24 GB RAM would be loads faster than what I assume is an M2 or M3 Air with less RAM.
 
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Every Lightroom test I've seen people run on M5 it runs slower than it did on M4. From what people are saying, it seems to be tied to Lightroom not having full utilization of the cores - the application is not optimized for M5 yet. It's Adobe, so they will get around to optimizing for M5 and engaging the cores more fully. However, it's Adobe so when they get around to optimizing for M5 is a whole other question.
 
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Tdude96 said:
Every Lightroom test I've seen people run on M5 it runs slower than it did on M4. From what people are saying, it seems to be tied to Lightroom not having full utilization of the cores - the application is not optimized for M5 yet. It's Adobe, so they will get around to optimizing for M5 and engaging the cores more fully. However, it's Adobe so when they get around to optimizing for M5 is a whole other question.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a smart move to keep money off the table for now and revisit later.
 
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Does the Lightroom's AI noise reduction is the similar one in Photoshop, provided by Topaz Labs?

If so, all the process is web based. Your computer does not process the files. All the computing are running on Topaz Labs servers. If you check Activity Monitor in your Mac you can verify that your Mac is pushing softly on CPU, while the network usage would be rocking!

That's why your MacBookAir is so efficient as your new MBP. So, for web based AI models, it won't make a difference if you are running neither one.
 
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devonroadie said:
Thanks for the ideas, I'll have to take a look at that.

The Air is a 2024 M3, and literally the only reason I bought the Pro was I thought it would process in Lightroom faster
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But wait, after the AI Noise Reduction applied, the export to JPEG process will be handled by your CPU, and so your brand new MBP will be way faster. A lot.
 
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devonroadie said:
Last week I bought a new MacBook Pro M5 with 24gb memory and 1TB hard disc.

I used lightroom a lot for editing raw 45mp files and particularly use AI features in it like de-noise.

I was hoping the MacBook would be faster than my 2 year old basic air, but it still takes around 45 seconds to de-noise a photo in lightroom which is only very slightly longer.

This was a £2k machine, how much more would I have to spend to get a MacBook Pro which is significantly faster for processing these files?

Sadly I think I will be returning this
Click to expand...
Same here I switched to a M5 MAX and 65 GB RAM and the same project takes about 9 seconds. So it's a life safer.
 
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devonroadie said:
Last week I bought a new MacBook Pro M5 with 24gb memory and 1TB hard disc.

I used lightroom a lot for editing raw 45mp files and particularly use AI features in it like de-noise.

I was hoping the MacBook would be faster than my 2 year old basic air, but it still takes around 45 seconds to de-noise a photo in lightroom which is only very slightly longer.

This was a £2k machine, how much more would I have to spend to get a MacBook Pro which is significantly faster for processing these files?

Sadly I think I will be returning this
Click to expand...
I would not return it.

I don’t use Lightroom, I use DxO PhotoLab, and I benchmarked my M5 Pro against my M1 Pro. Exports which take 45 second on the M1 take 9 to 10 seconds on the M5 Pro machine. Like you, I use 45 mp RAW files (a Canon R5) and I use the advanced denoise on export.

BIG difference.

I don’t know what’s up with Adobe, or maybe your system is new and running a lot of background tasks like drive indexing, but the M5 is a screamer. The internal SSD speeds alone are more than double what your old machine did so there’s no way it will be the same speed reading and writing files. I think you should re-test.
 
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I decided to swap my MacBook Pro yesterday whilst still in the 14 days.

I didn't want to spend loads extra as photography for me is just a hobby, so after watching a YouTube comparison by ArtIsRight I paid a little extra for the version with Pro chip and more cores.

I'm eased to say that in Lightroom the AI de-noise on my 45mp raw files is now around 17 seconds, so about a third of the time of the machine I returned.

Not a big deal to some but hoping this machine is fast enough to keep for a few years and now I'm happier that it might be able to keep up the pace for a while to come
 
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maflynn said:
Interesting, I wonder why.

Are the NPU counts the same between your 2 year old MBA and and current MBP? What model MBA exactly do you have, M2, M3?
Click to expand...
Even if they are, the M5 NPU is significantly faster. As is the CPU and GPU.

I'd check to see if the M5 isn't busy doing initial setup stuff like indexing, etc.


OP: you ARE editing the files on local storage, and not off a network drive or something?
 
devonroadie said:
I decided to swap my MacBook Pro yesterday whilst still in the 14 days.

I didn't want to spend loads extra as photography for me is just a hobby, so after watching a YouTube comparison by ArtIsRight I paid a little extra for the version with Pro chip and more cores.

I'm eased to say that in Lightroom the AI de-noise on my 45mp raw files is now around 17 seconds, so about a third of the time of the machine I returned.

Not a big deal to some but hoping this machine is fast enough to keep for a few years and now I'm happier that it might be able to keep up the pace for a while to come
Click to expand...
Wait. You boig
devonroadie said:
I decided to swap my MacBook Pro yesterday whilst still in the 14 days.

I didn't want to spend loads extra as photography for me is just a hobby, so after watching a YouTube comparison by ArtIsRight I paid a little extra for the version with Pro chip and more cores.

I'm eased to say that in Lightroom the AI de-noise on my 45mp raw files is now around 17 seconds, so about a third of the time of the machine I returned.

Not a big deal to some but hoping this machine is fast enough to keep for a few years and now I'm happier that it might be able to keep up the pace for a while to come
Click to expand...
The M5 Pro chip will not triple the speed of denoise compared to the M5. Something was wrong with your test setup.
 
devonroadie said:
Thanks for the ideas, I'll have to take a look at that.

The Air is a 2024 M3, and literally the only reason I bought the Pro was I thought it would process in Lightroom faster
Click to expand...

How much RAM is in the air? I find LRC to be very ram dependent (I shoot 61 mp raw files). Are you using Light room classic , which works locally, or light room which uses the cloud? And if locally are the files on external drives, because that makes a big difference too. I run LRC on an m5 air, an m3 max, and m3 ultra without huge time differences if I’m running off an external disk.
 
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Both machines had all the same specs minus the chip and were setup the same, no external drives involved.

I use Lightroom, and files were from local storage.
 
devonroadie said:
Both machines had all the same specs minus the chip and were setup the same, no external drives involved.

I use Lightroom, and files were from local storage.
Click to expand...
Well something was wrong with your first machine or had some rogue progress going on in the background that was eating up resources.. Either way, sounds like you're much happier with the new machine, it would be an improvement either way and sounds meaningful for your use case
 
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