When SLR Lounge Founding Partner Pye Jirsa, noticed his studio's IT needs had grown to 'beast' levels, he decided they should perform a series of tests to find out which machine was best suited for their needs. Taking two similarly priced boxes, a $4,431 iMac, and a $4,370 custom built PC, they set to the task of testing each machines' speeds in Adobe's Lightroom. The SLR Lounge crew uses Lightroom to process millions of images a year, so naturally they wanted to test the speeds of the features they used most. Armed with 1,121 identical RAW images from a Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 5DS they tested each machines': importing speeds, smart preview processing time, RAW image scroll times and panorama merging times. To my chagrin (but maybe not my surprise) the iMac got trounced, having been beaten by the custom PC in every single test.
For single/small photographer studios who are not processing large volumes of images Apple is still the best solution. It’s simple, reliable and fast enough. However, for a large studio where performance and efficiency are paramount, Apple’s product line can’t quite handle the job, at least not for a similar price to performance ratio. -Pye Jirsa
I'd love to share all the details and the results with you but as much as Pye loves us (and we him) it wouldn't be cool if we didn't send you over to SLR Lounge for the full and detailed results. As you can imagine, the results of this experiment has been met with a whole mess of whining and excuses from Apple fanboys (myself included). So, even if you don't give a damn about the results you should still head over to read the often hilarious comments.
[via SLR Lounge]
A 5k display can be had for the exact same price as the monitor they use in their build
I edit all my photos on a 1982 Casio digital calculator wristwatch, ...... kicks the crap out of a PC!
"For single/small photographer studios who are not processing large volumes of images Apple is still the best solution. It’s simple, reliable and fast enough. However, for a large studio where performance and efficiency are paramount, Apple’s product line can’t quite handle the job, at least not for a similar price to performance ratio. -Pye Jirsa"
Strangely, every ad agency I've worked with has their whole creative departments running exclusively on OSX. I'm inclined to think Apple can handle big jobs just fine :-)
The real problem is Adobe. LR has performance issues you can*t fix with throwing money into beefy hardware... and also Apple. Apple started with their openCL campaign really well and nice in the past and then forgot to go this way further... you can only get total shitty and slow gpus for apple since years... why?!
Also the Adobe GPU integration is the worst of all raw processing engines. It 's more a proof of concept and brings nearly 0 benefits if it works.
Let's take a look at "our" problem from a different viewpoint:
We want to process, render, tweak huge raw files in the fastest possible way!
OK, maybe Mac vs PC is not the real question, take a look at Capture One Pro, they integrated GPU rendering fully into their software, everything is accellated, not just the development module.
On Mac and on PC! They can even use multiple GPUs!
This means your CPU does't effect the performance so much as on Adobe.
I'm using a couple of Macs and have a PC, too. First I was thinking about buying a new Mac für 5k € to fasten my annoying slow LR/Nikon D800 workflow. But first I tried CO on my 5 year old PC (4 Core 3,5 GHZ Ivy Bridge) with a GTX 970 GPU and was blown away. This old PC renders the D800 Raws in under 1 second on Capture One in Lightroom the same PC needs 6 seconds per file! The fastest 6c Macpro needs a little more than 4 seconds for these files.
Sometimes it is more about the software !
even though pc might be a bit efficient than the mac i would never switch. windows os bugs are not my friend! why build while you can get what you want off the shelf? not everyone knows the tech knows of these gadgets.
It has been a long time since an Apple computer has been better than a PC overall.
Macs are still bought for multimedia work out of tradition, as it is expected to see Macs in a Design Environment.
Funny enough, my wife bought me an iMac only a few weeks ago, and although it is the 27" 5K super cool and trendy machine, I immediately noticed it was lagging and slower than my purpose build PC which surprised me.Then again I have Xeon Processors in the PC which are heavy workers.
Cheaper PC configuration, ~2600$
i7 4790K
ASRock Z97 Extreme6
32GB HyperX Beast CL9
SSD 850 pro 256GB - system
SSD 850 pro 128GB – scratch, cache
2x WD Blk 4TB – Raid 1
Quadro K620 2GB
FSP Platinum 550
EIZO CS270 or DELL UP2716D
Zalman FX70 or Hyper 212 EVO
Zalman Z3 Plus
RaidSonic IB-868-B
An another PC configuration with 5K monitor ~$3300
i7 4790K ($330)
ASRock Z97 Extreme6 ($170)
32GB HyperX Beast CL9 ($135)
SSD 850 pro 256GB – system ($120)
SSD 850 pro 256GB – scratch, cache ($120)
2x WD Black 4TB – Raid 1 ($390)
Quadro K1200 4GB ($285)
FSP Platinum 550 ($100)
Dell UltraSharp UP2715K ($1570)
Hyper 212 EVO ($30)
Zalman Z3 Plus ($50)
RaidSonic IB-868-B ($60)