Which Mac Mini recommended for my kind of Usage ?

[hoodlum90]

Is the 27" monitor 4K? The reason I ask is that on Adobe's page for Photoshop they mention 8gb as minimum and 16gb+ is recommended. I noticed that a 4k monitor also requires 4gb of memory and since memory is now shared that is also something to consider if you have 4k or if you think that is something you may need to support in the near future. Multiple monitors will also require additional memory.

Photoshop system requirements

Your computer must meet the minimum technical specifications outlined below to run and use Photoshop.

helpx.adobe.com

 

[marcusalwayswins]

Is the 27" monitor 4K? The reason I ask is that on Adobe's page for Photoshop they mention 8gb as minimum and 16gb+ is recommended. I noticed that a 4k monitor also requires 4gb of memory and since memory is now shared that is also something to consider if you have 4k or if you think that is something you may need to support in the near future. Multiple monitors will also require additional memory.

Photoshop system requirements

Your computer must meet the minimum technical specifications outlined below to run and use Photoshop.

helpx.adobe.com

I mostly use Affinity Photo not so much of Photoshop. I use.Photoshop only when Affinity Photo cannot do the Job.

No My 27" Monitor is not 4K but in the very near Future I am gonna upgrade to either 32" 4K or 27" 4K.

 

[JustAnExpat]

Any more suggestion on a place where I can find it ?

Maybe Macofalltrades? They don't have any M1 Mac minis right now though.

Buy Used and Refurbished Apple Mac Minis | Mac of All Trades

Purchase a discounted Mac mini from Mac of All Trades - reliable, budget-friendly options for a desktop computer. Benefit from affordability, warranties, and free shipping. Shop now!

www.macofalltrades.com

 

[JustAnExpat]

Earlier in the thread folks when asked the same question by me have said occasional photo editing in whatever App that you use still does not warrant, call for 16GB of RAM. 8GB will do the Job just fine.

Now I am confused 🙄🙄🙄

When it comes to photo editing, the more Ram, the better. However, you're coming from a windows 7 machine. The M1 will run circles around your Windows 7 machine, regardless of how much Ram you have.

 

[NeonNights]

We have some antiquated notions about how much RAM is needed today. On traditional Intel/AMD architectures, yes nothing less than 16GB RAM minimum. If the 8GB M1 Mini fits OP's budget I still feel the additional cost of 16GB RAM on Apple Silicon is unnecessary and overkill for everyday moderate use.

Even with heavy photo editing, MaxTech comparisons only show an 11% performance difference:

Not only that, you have to get into 8K video editing to really stress the M1 and see a major difference going to 16GB. If you factor in cost, the 8GB is still doing phenomenally well against a top-spec 32GB RAM Intel system costing 5x more! An 8GB M1 Mini is a lot of performance on the cheap.

 

[hoodlum90]

I mostly use Affinity Photo not so much of Photoshop. I use.Photoshop only when Affinity Photo cannot do the Job.

No My 27" Monitor is not 4K but in the very near Future I am gonna upgrade to either 32" 4K or 27" 4K.

If you are planning to upgrade to a 4K monitor then you should go to 16GB. The VRAM required could be as much as 4GB and that needs to come from the main memory. A system with 8GB would leave too little for you main apps.

 

[EugW]

We have some antiquated notions about how much RAM is needed today. On traditional Intel/AMD architectures, yes nothing less than 16GB RAM minimum. If the 8GB M1 Mini fits OP's budget I still feel the additional cost of 16GB RAM on Apple Silicon is unnecessary and overkill for everyday moderate use.

Even with heavy photo editing, MaxTech comparisons only show an 11% performance difference:

View attachment 2105611
Not only that, you have to get into 8K video editing to really stress the M1 and see a major difference going to 16GB. If you factor in cost, the 8GB is still doing phenomenally well against a top-spec 32GB RAM Intel system costing 5x more! An 8GB M1 Mini is a lot of performance on the cheap.
View attachment 2105612

Actually, that's pretty telling, if you note that those tests are benchmark tests without multitasking. If 8 GB is already limiting performance just with sequential RAW exports (not 50 simultaneous file exports), the it's going to limit it even more if you're multitasking at the same time. And worse case scenario, if you do a bit too much, you'll get app crashes.

Basically given the tests results he gave, my conclusion would be the opposite of his, and would recommend that for those types of workloads, definitely get 16 GB. Cuz almost nobody just sits around running a single application and nothing else, just running benchmarks all day.

Indeed, if you check out some of the guys who did reviews after say 1 month, there are a lot of people who ended up upgrading from 8 GB to 16 GB because of slow downs and random application crashes when they were maxing out the RAM.

BTW, even on Intel machines, doing very occasional light photo editing is not a problem on 8 GB RAM. It's faster on M1 though because it's more efficient and the CPU is faster, but it works just fine on Intel as well.

 

[marcusalwayswins]

We have some antiquated notions about how much RAM is needed today. On traditional Intel/AMD architectures, yes nothing less than 16GB RAM minimum. If the 8GB M1 Mini fits OP's budget I still feel the additional cost of 16GB RAM on Apple Silicon is unnecessary and overkill for everyday moderate use.

Even with heavy photo editing, MaxTech comparisons only show an 11% performance difference:

View attachment 2105611
Not only that, you have to get into 8K video editing to really stress the M1 and see a major difference going to 16GB. If you factor in cost, the 8GB is still doing phenomenally well against a top-spec 32GB RAM Intel system costing 5x more! An 8GB M1 Mini is a lot of performance on the cheap.
View attachment 2105612

I am already subscribed to Vadim and His Brother's Max YouTube channel Maxtech. And I had watched this Video immediately when it came back then, but back then I had no plans to shift to Mac Mini. So I again watched this Video today and yes he says he found only about 10-11% Performance gain with the 16GB RAM over 8GB RAM.

 

[NeonNights]

I am already subscribed to Vadim and His Brother's Max YouTube channel Maxtech. And I had watched this Video immediately when it came back then, but back then I had no plans to shift to Mac Mini. So I again watched this Video today and yes he says he found only about 10-11% Performance gain with the 16GB RAM over 8GB RAM.

As I posted earlier, I returned an 8GB M1 MacBook Air and kept the 16GB version because I could afford it and I had a hard time sticking with the same "8GB RAM" as my 2015 13" MacBook Pro. But honestly the 8GB M1 MacBook Air was super responsive when I had multiple apps open (Chrome, MS Office, Photoshop, Lightroom, Final Cut Pro). I was trying to stress the 8GB M1 and it basically laughed it off. I can only offer my personal experience.

Of course, this was on my MacBook Air with 13" display. I will receive the M1 Mini this Wednesday and will be connecting it to a 4K television that doubles as my personal/work monitor. There are already tons of YouTube videos demonstrating the prowess of the 8GB M1 versus 16GB but I'll go ahead and record a sample of me multi-tasking on the 8GB M1 Mini with 4K TV and share the results later. I do not use Affinity Photo but will try to throw that in the mix too.

EDIT: If I have time I'll also connect my 16GB M1 MacBook Air to the 4K TV and run the same test for comparison. I am not saying no one needs 16GB, but rather 8GB on Apple silicon goes a long way.

 

[phrehdd]

Just to piggyback on this thread: I have similar usage needs to the OP, but do a fair amount of hobbyist Topaz AI photo processing. Should that push me towards 16GB? (Otherwise my usage is largely browsing/office-type stuff.)

Yes it would make sense. I use Topaz products along with other Photo apps. Topaz can work with less but suffers and at times might suffer a crash if over taxed. This holds especially true if you have other apps open and in particular browsers that land of web pages that suck the life out of your RAM.

 

[phrehdd]

We have some antiquated notions about how much RAM is needed today. On traditional Intel/AMD architectures, yes nothing less than 16GB RAM minimum. If the 8GB M1 Mini fits OP's budget I still feel the additional cost of 16GB RAM on Apple Silicon is unnecessary and overkill for everyday moderate use.

Even with heavy photo editing, MaxTech comparisons only show an 11% performance difference:

View attachment 2105611
Not only that, you have to get into 8K video editing to really stress the M1 and see a major difference going to 16GB. If you factor in cost, the 8GB is still doing phenomenally well against a top-spec 32GB RAM Intel system costing 5x more! An 8GB M1 Mini is a lot of performance on the cheap.
View attachment 2105612

Interesting - I had an M1 Mac Mini with 512/16. I use Affinity Photo and at times some plugins. If I have Safari open and perhaps a couple of lightweight apps, my photo editing sessions become compromised. The test results you show might be when just that app is open. I am unsure if most people work that way and fully close out browsers and some may perhaps have active AV protection on etc.

Sadly, the M1 Mini became frustrating due to the lack of any real memory management. As I move further into photo related work, the Mini proved to be less than satisfactory even with 16 gigs of RAM. While I am with the same belief that it should be more than enough, it simply didn't hold up. I have moved on to a system that has allows for more than 16 gigs. I would love the Mini with 32 or 64 gig option.

As for a typical user, I would recommend 16 gigs no matter what to bring longevity to the purchase. Between the advancement of MacOS and newer apps coming, 16 gigs is a better bet. Some argue that 16 gigs should be the new baseline.

 

[EugW]

Interesting - I had an M1 Mac Mini with 512/16. I use Affinity Photo and at times some plugins. If I have Safari open and perhaps a couple of lightweight apps, my photo editing sessions become compromised. The test results you show might be when just that app is open. I am unsure if most people work that way and fully close out browsers and some may perhaps have active AV protection on etc.

Sadly, the M1 Mini became frustrating due to the lack of any real memory management. As I move further into photo related work, the Mini proved to be less than satisfactory even with 16 gigs of RAM. While I am with the same belief that it should be more than enough, it simply didn't hold up. I have moved on to a system that has allows for more than 16 gigs. I would love the Mini with 32 or 64 gig option.

As for a typical user, I would recommend 16 gigs no matter what to bring longevity to the purchase. Between the advancement of MacOS and newer apps coming, 16 gigs is a better bet. Some argue that 16 gigs should be the new baseline.

I disagree that 16 GB should be the baseline, but I agree that many people can easily outgrow 8 GB, and some even 16 GB.

With regards to the baseline, I bought 8 GB machines for my wife and daughter last year, and neither ever stress their machines in terms of RAM usage. They are older machines (13" 2017 MacBook Air, 13" 2015 MacBook Pro), but that's besides the point as they were running Monterey so they had the latest OS until last week. They basically run just browsers including maybe a half-dozen media-rich Chrome tabs, Mail, Messages, Calendar, FaceTime, and Pages. 8 GB is fine for this.

For some of my usage, 8 GB is fine too. In fact, I'm typing on an 8 GB Intel Mac mini right now, with a few Safari tabs, Messages, Citrix VPN, etc. and this old 2014 machine is happily humming along. OTOH, when I multitask a lot more with bigger applications, 8 GB is quite restrictive. 16 GB is usually fine but I occasionally may push that limit a bit too (or at least I used to when I used to run Photos, PowerPoint, Keynote, Word, and Excel at the same time on top of the rest). However, my 24 GB iMac is more than fine for everything I do, so a 24 GB M2 / M2 Pro Mac mini in 2023 will be great for me. Meanwhile, I'll probably pass down the 8 GB Mac mini to my son and it should be fine for him too, since his usage is like my daughter's.

 

[phrehdd]

I disagree that 16 GB should be the baseline, but I agree that many people can easily outgrow 8 GB, and some even 16 GB.

With regards to the baseline, I bought 8 GB machines for my wife and daughter last year, and neither ever stress their machines in terms of RAM usage. They are older machines (13" 2017 MacBook Air, 13" 2015 MacBook Pro), but that's besides the point as they were running Monterey so they had the latest OS until last week. They basically run just browsers including maybe a half-dozen media-rich Chrome tabs, Mail, Messages, Calendar, FaceTime, and Pages. 8 GB is fine for this.

For some of my usage, 8 GB is fine too. In fact, I'm typing on an 8 GB Intel Mac mini right now, with a few Safari tabs, Messages, Citrix VPN, etc. and this old 2014 machine is happily humming along. OTOH, when I multitask a lot more with bigger applications, 8 GB is quite restrictive. 16 GB is usually fine but I occasionally may push that limit a bit too (or at least I used to when I used to run Photos, PowerPoint, Keynote, Word, and Excel at the same time on top of the rest). However, my 24 GB iMac is more than fine for everything I do, so a 24 GB M2 / M2 Pro Mac mini in 2023 will be great for me. Meanwhile, I'll probably pass down the 8 GB Mac mini to my son and it should be fine for him too, since his usage is like my daughter's.

Well we may agree that the earlier Intel machines did better. As I stated in some posts, I came from a 2015 MBP. I believe the combination of unified memory (M chip) and new OS = no real memory management that is somewhat needed. I would be happy if Safari would offer a way to limit caching etc. in a meaningful way as a start.

 

[hoodlum90]

Well we may agree that the earlier Intel machines did better. As I stated in some posts, I came from a 2015 MBP. I believe the combination of unified memory (M chip) and new OS = no real memory management that is somewhat needed. I would be happy if Safari would offer a way to limit caching etc. in a meaningful way as a start.

The unified memory is definitely a big difference, especially on 4k+ monitors where you need 4gb memory for the display. I think a lot of the memory management issues are caused by the Apps themselves. Hopefully, over time the software developer can resolve this.

 

[phrehdd]

The unified memory is definitely a big difference, especially on 4k+ monitors where you need 4gb memory for the display. I think a lot of the memory management issues are caused by the Apps themselves. Hopefully, over time the software developer can resolve this.

This is rather interesting as no one really mentions how, in the past, there was a time when Minis could either come with the Intel Iris integrated chip that shared CPU memory or with ATI dedicated video chip with memory. The Iris was looked down upon not only for not being as powerful but for eating into the RAM and no control over the memory allocated. The trade off with the M chip moving forward will be interesting to watch and how they sooner or later deal with this inherent problem.

 

[NeonNights]

The refurbished 8GB M1 Mac Mini just arrived! It looks brand new, as expected from Apple refurb.

It is a busy day so I won't get to setup or play with it until tomorrow.

 

[NeonNights]

TL;DR version: Affinity Photo is an enormous memory hog or there's some substantial memory issues with the app. Even a 16GB M1 isn't enough.

Original: @marcusalwayswins, sorry it has taken a few days to get these comparison videos up, we've been dealing with a broken water heater. I actually stopped my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription a few months ago and only have Affinity Photo trial and Final Cut Pro to demo. I am new to Affinity Photo so only tried a few sliders and filters but hopefully it gives you an idea of performance.

I kept Microsoft Word and Safari open in the background with 10 tabs to simulate a typical use case. The images are 20MB RAW files from my Sony RX10 IV. For video editing I used a 3-minute 4k60 clip of our elm tree blowimg in the wind, coupled with some older 1080 videos of surfers. I tried to mix it up to show Affinity Photo before and after Final Cut Pro loads.

One odd behavior is Final Cut Pro doesn’t seem to render until after I stop screen recording. I observed this several times. Affinity Photo also has Metal/integrated graphics acceleration enabled on both the Mac Mini and MacBook Air. I am not going to say which video is the 8GB or 16GB. Can you tell a difference between recording A versus B? (OP - please see updated findings below the video links.)

Test A:

Test B:

UPDATE: There is some very peculiar behavior in Affinity Photo. It didn't make sense to me that video editing on 8GB M1 was every bit as smooth as 16GB RAM in Final Cut Pro, yet Affinity Photo "beach balled" (aka spinning hourglass on Windows) often when loading just a handful of RAW images. Importing five images was equivalent between 8GB vs 16GB but loading 10-40 RAW images really slowed down both systems. This doesn't make sense since 20MB RAW files are much smaller than a video file.

I still believe an 8GB M1 Mac Mini is more than sufficient for editing photos, just not in Affinity Photo apparently. I edited photos fine in Lightroom/Photoshop on a 2015 8GB MacBook Pro but Affinity Photo is a different story. For every 20-25MB Sony or Canon RAW file imported, Affinity Photo memory use jumps 1.5-2.0 GigaBytes! Even for a 10MB JPEG imported, Affinity Photo memory use jumps almost 400MB. This is simply importing, no editing yet, no layers, etc. This is very perplexing since Affinity Photo has very light system requirements to run the app. I don't recall Lightroom nor Photoshop requiring that much memory per photo upon import!

Affinity Photo startup:

Affinity Photo after importing a single 20MB Sony RAW:

Affinity Photo after importing three 20MB Sony RAW:

Affinity Photo restarted, import of two 25MB Canon RAW:

Affinity Photo restarted, import of two 10MB JPEGs:

UPDATE 2: @marcusalwayswins, I did a little more sleuthing and came across posts about Affinity Photo having issues with the Ventura beta. Perhaps the upcoming November 9 update for Affinity apps will resolve some of the performance issues under MacOS Ventura. I considered purchasing Affinity Photo but am holding off until the memory usage gets reigned in.

 

[EugW]

I think one reviewer put it succinctly by saying he doesn't really care that much about memory vs. render times, since in both instances he'd leave and go get a coffee or whatever. His main interest was editing feel under heavy multitasking and system stability. In his experience using his workflow, 16 GB was more stable and reliable than 8 GB, but YMMV.

 

[marcusalwayswins]

TL;DR version: Affinity Photo is an enormous memory hog or there's some substantial memory issues with the app. Even a 16GB M1 isn't enough.

Original: @marcusalwayswins, sorry it has taken a few days to get these comparison videos up, we've been dealing with a broken water heater. I actually stopped my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription a few months ago and only have Affinity Photo trial and Final Cut Pro to demo. I am new to Affinity Photo so only tried a few sliders and filters but hopefully it gives you an idea of performance.

I kept Microsoft Word and Safari open in the background with 10 tabs to simulate a typical use case. The images are 20MB RAW files from my Sony RX10 IV. For video editing I used a 3-minute 4k60 clip of our elm tree blowimg in the wind, coupled with some older 1080 videos of surfers. I tried to mix it up to show Affinity Photo before and after Final Cut Pro loads.

One odd behavior is Final Cut Pro doesn’t seem to render until after I stop screen recording. I observed this several times. Affinity Photo also has Metal/integrated graphics acceleration enabled on both the Mac Mini and MacBook Air. I am not going to say which video is the 8GB or 16GB. Can you tell a difference between recording A versus B? (OP - please see updated findings below the video links.)

Test A:

Test B:

UPDATE: There is some very peculiar behavior in Affinity Photo. It didn't make sense to me that video editing on 8GB M1 was every bit as smooth as 16GB RAM in Final Cut Pro, yet Affinity Photo "beach balled" (aka spinning hourglass on Windows) often when loading just a handful of RAW images. Importing five images was equivalent between 8GB vs 16GB but loading 10-40 RAW images really slowed down both systems. This doesn't make sense since 20MB RAW files are much smaller than a video file.

I still believe an 8GB M1 Mac Mini is more than sufficient for editing photos, just not in Affinity Photo apparently. I edited photos fine in Lightroom/Photoshop on a 2015 8GB MacBook Pro but Affinity Photo is a different story. For every 20-25MB Sony or Canon RAW file imported, Affinity Photo memory use jumps 1.5-2.0 GigaBytes! Even for a 10MB JPEG imported, Affinity Photo memory use jumps almost 400MB. This is simply importing, no editing yet, no layers, etc. This is very perplexing since Affinity Photo has very light system requirements to run the app. I don't recall Lightroom nor Photoshop requiring that much memory per photo upon import!

Affinity Photo startup:
View attachment 2108758

Affinity Photo after importing a single 20MB Sony RAW:
View attachment 2108760

Affinity Photo after importing three 20MB Sony RAW:
View attachment 2108759

Affinity Photo restarted, import of two 25MB Canon RAW:
View attachment 2108761

Affinity Photo restarted, import of two 10MB JPEGs:
View attachment 2108762


UPDATE 2: @marcusalwayswins, I did a little more sleuthing and came across posts about Affinity Photo having issues with the Ventura beta. Perhaps the upcoming November 9 update for Affinity apps will resolve some of the performance issues under MacOS Ventura. I considered purchasing Affinity Photo but am holding off until the memory usage gets reigned in.

So are you saying If I plan to use Affinity Photo which is a memory hogger on the M1 Mac Mini. I should ideally go for the 16GB RAM Variant ?

 

[NeonNights]

So are you saying If I plan to use Affinity Photo which is a memory hogger on the M1 Mac Mini. I should ideally go for the 16GB RAM Variant ?

No, I'm saying based on what I'm seeing I wouldn't use Affinity Photo, even on a 16GB M1. Maybe the app works better under Windows, or Mac with Intel. I plan to play with some more settings tomorrow to see if it makes a difference and will compare Affinity Photo on my 16GB Windows PC, as well as an older 8GB MacBook Pro with Intel CPU.

An 8GB M1 flies through everything else and it's ridiculous that Affinity Photo consumes almost 2 gigabytes of memory every time a RAW image is simply imported. That seriously limits how many photos you can work with at a time. The issue is the app, or some setting in it. I liked using Affinity Photo in my testing but this level of memory consumption certainly isn't normal based on what I've read in the Affinity forum. The app is supposedly optimized for M1 but Affinity forum posts suggest the app ran fine on MacOS Big Sur and started having issues after Monterey and the latest Ventura. I am hoping a setting, or the upcoming November 9th update, fixes memory performance on M1.

You are more familiar with Affinity Photo than I am. How much increase in RAM use do you see in Windows each time you import an image?

 

[marcusalwayswins]

You are more familiar with Affinity Photo than I am. How much increase in RAM use do you see in Windows each time you import an image?

Oh I am on an a very Old Windows Machine so it is really not optimised or recommended to use any such High Advanced Software on a Computer that I have. Let alone Memory Management or any data that I can see but yes even on Windows 7 Intel Core 2 Duo Computer lol ! (I know some guys would be thinking which world is this guy living in) it takes close to around 1.2GB of RAM or thereabouts

 

[NeonNights]

Oh I am an a very Old Windows Machine so it is really not optimised or recommended to use any such High Advanced Software on a Computer that I have. Let alone Memory Management or any data that I can see but yes even on Windows 7 Intel Core 2 Duo Computer lol ! (I know some guys would be thinking which world is this guy living in) it takes close to around 1.2GB of RAM or thereabouts

Thanks, and wow, 1.2GB still seems like a lot to me to import an image. Let compare against my old Windows boxes -- one is Ivy Bridge and the other is SkyLake. Sandy and Ivy Bridge were direct successors to Core2Duo and great in their day but I had to add a GPU to my home theater PC just to decode and playback 4K 60Hz HEVC.

 

[marcusalwayswins]

Thanks, and wow, 1.2GB still seems like a lot to me to import an image. Let compare against my old Windows boxes -- one is Ivy Bridge and the other is SkyLake. Sandy and Ivy Bridge were direct successors to Core2Duo and great in their day but I had to add a GPU to my home theater PC just to decode and playback 4K 60Hz HEVC.

Oh I meant the total space it occupies when it is running. I didn't necessarily mean only at the time of importing photo in Affinity Photo

 

[NeonNights]

@marcusalwayswins, some good news! I am re-recommending the 8GB M1 Mac Mini, even for Affinity Photo.

I installed AP on my i3-6100 SkyLake box with an nVidia GTX 950, all drivers and Windows 10 fully updated. With 16GB of RAM AP exhibited noticeable lag compared to the 8GB M1 Mini. When importing photos the WinTel box consumes ~1GB of RAM for each RAW imports -- so less memory use than the 2GB per RAW import on the M1 Mini. However, performance on the 3.7 Ghz SkyLake with 16GB was laggy and the exposure slider took 2 seconds to reflect changes. This was connected to 4K monitor.

Next up, I installed AP on my 2015 MacBook Pro (2.7 Ghz Intel i5, 8GB RAM, macOS Monterey) and connected it to the 4K monitor. I learned about the Developer Persona Assistant and setting the RAW Engine to Apple Core Image RAW instead of the default Serif Labs. This cut memory consumption in half, matching Affinity Photo on Win10. My old trusty MacBook Pro did admirably and was a more pleasant experience to edit in AP than the WinTel box. The exposure slider still took a second to update changes but it was noticeably quicker than my 16GB Intel PC.

Lastly, I switched to Apple Core Image RAW on the 8GB M1 Mini and memory consumption expectedly went down by almost half and I can now comfortably import a dozen RAW files and edit them in real-time without any lag. If you can stretch the budget to a 16GB M1 then I'm sure it will serve you well for many years. For myself, I'm going to purchase Affinity Photo and keep my 8GB M1 Mini.

Affinity Photo RAW Engine set to default "Serif Labs", (after importing 3 Sony RAW files):

Affinity Photo RAW Engine set to "Apple (Core Image RAW)", (after importing 3 Sony RAW files):

 

[NeonNights]

Oh I meant the total space it occupies when it is running. I didn't necessarily mean only at the time of importing photo in Affinity Photo

Oh, I see. I don't know what resolution your 27" monitor is but keep in mind that will affect memory use. Importing and displaying photos in Affinity Photo used a few hundred MB less RAM, per photo, on the built-in display of my MacBook Pro compared to when I output it to a 4K monitor.