Some of these are really basic, but some of these are complex operations and in order to minimize artifacts between stages of the rendering pipeline, darktable treats every pixel of the image along the way as a 32-bit single precision numberâthe type of math that CPUs donât traditionally do very well. darktable effects a processed image by executing its rendering pipeline, which includes all of the modules youâve applied in the image stack: like levels, exposure, cropping, and denoising. There are the basic steps of reading an image from disk and putting it into memory, but where the bulk of your time is going to be spent is rendering images. Itâs probably helpful at this point to understand what contributes to a smooth user experience in darktable, and whatâs important to user performance.

That has been working out well, but again, I hit the limit of the on-device storage and honestly the lower-powered laptop components werenât as fast as I could get with a desktop. I ended-up replacing it with a 16â MacBook Pro with a Radeon 5500M and an 8TB SSD. I figured if I needed more storage, I should take the opportunity to improve the performance as well. Obviously, computers continue to get faster, and I figured Iâd upgrade at some point a forcing function becoming when I moved to the Leica Q2 and its larger raw files. It had been working fine for 8MP images, and even 16MP images, but it never felt snappy. GNU/Linux is by far the focus of darktable development, so how would it compare to running on MacOS?Ī couple of years ago, I did most of my editing on an Intel NUC with 16GB RAM and an integrated graphics card. I wanted to see how the new Apple M-based processors would compare to the existing X86/AMD64 architectures, and also, how does MacOS compare to GNU/Linux when running darktable, specifically. Iâve been looking at ways of speeding-up my editing workflow, looking at principally two options in the near future to replace my Intel-based Mac:Īn upcoming Mac Pro based on Apple's ARM processorsĪ GNU/Linux desktop based on an AMD Threadripper

Darktable mac m1