Adobe says Photoshop on M1 runs 50% faster than 2019 Intel MacBook

This week, Adobe updated Photoshop to official Apple silicon support, giving customers native support on the latest Mac computers with Apple’s M1. In an interview with Computer worldPhotoshop product manager Mark Dahm has promoted official support for Apple silicon, saying Photoshop runs 50% faster on a MacBook M1 compared to last year’s Intel MacBook.

Speaking about the team’s challenges in transitioning to Apple silicon, Dahm said performance is of the highest priority. Adobe wanted to make sure it matched Photoshop performance on older architectures for customers running Apple Silicon.

Photoshop has been fortunate enough to serve Mac customers for over 30 years and after experiencing the transition from Power PC to Intel chips during 2005/2006, a few familiar considerations came to mind when the announcement of Apple silicon was made.

On the one hand, performance is a priority for our creative business customers, so we wondered how long it would take us to match the years of performance tuning that ensured Photoshop’s sophisticated blending and rendering capabilities run smoothly. .

Apple encourages all developers to build and recompile their applications with official support for Apple silicon. Until the apps are updated, they run on Apple silicon using Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, which allows apps designed for Intel processors to run on the new architecture. Dahm said Photoshop works well enough with Rosetta, in some cases even faster than it does natively on Intel Mac computers.

Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta Mode allowed Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on ‌M1‌ devices from day one, without requiring significant code base changes. And a lot of features worked as fast, if not faster, than on previous systems, so the previous performance questions were answered quite satisfactorily.

In its testing, Adobe found that Photoshop on a MacBook ‌M1‌ ran 50% faster than Photoshop on a 2019 Intel MacBook with similar configurations. Even with the significant increase in performance, Dahm claimed this was just the start.

We compared a MacBook ‌M1‌ to a similarly configured previous generation MacBook, and found that in native mode Photoshop ran 50% faster than the old hardware. These great performance improvements are just the start and we will continue to work with Apple to further optimize performance over time.

The power of the new ‌M1‌ chip motivated the team to push even further the features that have become a Photoshop staple, Dahm said. Features like content responsive fill, automatic subject selection, sky replacement tools and more have been re-energized with ‌M1‌.

We were eager to tap into the more specialized aspects of the ‌M1‌ chip to see how they might re-energize some of the seemingly magical features that have since become staples of the Photoshop experience over the years; features like Content Aware Fill, the Healing Brush, specialty filters, and even newcomers like machine learning-based Auto Select Subject and Sky Replacement tools.

Going forward, Dahm said Adobe looks forward to “bringing even more performance gains and the magic of Photoshop to life” on future Apple silicon chips. Dahm also said that the continued evolution of Apple’s silicon platform will allow Adobe to constantly adjust and optimize Photoshop to run at peak performance without the need to rely on Rosetta.