Batch Processing Speed on M1 Max

[loganemakf]

This may be a dumb question, but I’m wondering whether the following is normal/intended behavior.

I have a 2015 core i7 iMac and a new M1 Max 16” MacBook Pro. When running batch jobs in Affinity Photo, my 4-core/8-thread iMac predictably processes ~8 photos at a time. However, when doing the same thing on my M1 Max MBP (which has at least 8 usable cores), Affinity seems to only process two photos at a time. I haven’t run a side-by-side test to compare speed but the laptop’s SSD is multiple times faster than the iMac’s so I’d expect to see at least a small speed improvement in batch processing from that alone, to say nothing of the dramatically faster memory and CPU architecture improvements. And in case it makes a difference, my batch jobs are typically just converting 100-200 .afphoto files to jpegs (at full resolution, 90% quality).

Thanks in advance to anyone who can corroborate or provide an explanation for this behavior.

[ErikA310]

I have noticed the same on my MacBook Pro 16" M1 Max (2ec, 8pc, 32c GPU, 32GB); MacOS Monterey 12.1; AP 1.10.4. All files where read and written from and to the internal SSD. The macro I'm applying consists of 9 steps. Setting the units to mm, Document resizing (lancos 3, separable), setting the document margins and adding/moving 3 guides.

It looks like that only 2 performance cores are fully utilized during the execution of the batch job. All other cores and GPU only show minor utilization. I added two screenshots, 'Before' and 'During' the processing. 'Hardware acceleration' in 'Performance' settings were check marked (Apple M1 Max (Metal)) as well as 'Parallel processing'  was enabled in the batch job definition. Not sure if the behaviour is expected or if it is rather an issue/bug.

[stokerg]

Hi @loganemakfand Welcome to the Forums,

Can you just confirm you have Parallel Processing enabled?  As Affinity then be using a core for each process.

While i personally don't have an M1 Max Pro to compare this with, i know the Dev team do all have access to one, so i can easily get this logged  

On 1/17/2022 at 3:49 AM, ErikA310 said:

It looks like that only 2 performance cores are fully utilized during the execution of the batch job. All other cores and GPU only show minor utilization. I added two screenshots, 'Before' and 'During' the processing. 'Hardware acceleration' in 'Performance' settings were check marked (Apple M1 Max (Metal)) as well as 'Parallel processing'  was enabled in the batch job definition. Not sure if the behaviour is expected or if it is rather an issue/bug.

 

Thanks for reporting this also  

While i don't have an M1 Max Pro to confirm this with, i should enough to get this logged with the Dev team, who all do have access an M1 Max Pro  

[loganemakf]

Hey @stokerg!

Yep, I always run with parallel processing enabled. I just screen-recorded the behavior in case that's helpful: 

 

Thanks for the attention & send the dev team my regards!

[theRando]

Can confirm the same thing happens on a M1 Max that I use too. Parallel processing will only do 2 at a time while on an older i9 Mac it will handle parallel as expected.