Paul Morris on March 13, 2021, 10:39 pm

Adobe Claims 50% Photoshop Performance Increase On Apple M1 MacBook

Photoshop Product Manager, Mark Dahm, has used an interview with Computerworld to wax lyrical about Apple Silicon. Now that Photoshop runs natively on Apple M1 MacBooks, Dahm has specified that the app runs 50% faster on Apple’s M1 comparative to last year’s Intel-based MacBook.

As part of the transition to supporting the Apple M1, there were a lot of challenges for the Photoshop team. Out of those challenges, the performance was one of the most important with Adobe wanting to ensure that the performance of the app was at least equal to how it runs on older model MacBooks and older architectures. Dahm and the team used previous experiences when moving from Power PC to Intel to tackle the challenges:

Photoshop has been fortunate enough to have been serving Mac customers for over 30 years and having lived through the transition from Power PC to Intel chips in the 2005/2006 timeframe, a few familiar considerations came to mind as the Apple silicon announcement was made.

For one, performance is top-of-mind for our creative professional customers, so we wondered how long it might take for us to match the years of performance-tuning that ensured smooth operation for Photoshop’s sophisticated blending and rendering capabilities.

As part of Adobe’s internal testing of the newly compiled Photoshop app, the team found that it runs 50% faster on the M1 MacBook compared to Photoshop 2019 that was running on an older Intel-based MacBook with a similar confirmation and similar technical specification. You’d think that level of performance was more than enough to keep the Adobe team happy but it seems that it’s only just the beginning.

We compared an ‌M1‌ MacBook to a previous-generation MacBook similarly configured, and found that under native mode, Photoshop was running 50% faster than the older hardware. These great performance improvements are just the beginning, and we will continue to work together with Apple to further optimize performance over time.

The initial gains and performance are impressive but it looks like it’s just the beginning of iterative work that the team is going to be doing alongside Apple on M1-based Macs.