I couldn’t stop myself, and compared darktable performance across all of my computers. As a fun aside, this includes a custom-compiled arm64 build for a new Snapdragon-based Windows tablet.
All the computers were connected to the same 4K displays, editing the same photo in the same way, performance being measured by darktable’s performance logging feature.
Darktable can run in CPU mode or GPU/OpenCL mode. On the snapdragon, currently only CPU mode is available (OpenCL crashes).
Machines I have available:
- Surface Pro 11 with Snapdragon Plus
- Mac Studio with M2 Max
- Work Laptop with i7-12700H and NVidia T1200
- Gaming Desktop with i5-10400 and NVidia GTX 3060
Performance was tested in two modes, one render at screen resolution (during editing), and one at export resolution (high quality mode). These are the first and second number, respectively, each given in seconds. Each measurement was repeated multiple times and averaged. The second render has 24 MP, which is about 10 times as many pixels as the ~2.5 MP of the display area on my 4K screen.
- 0.16s/1.6s for Snapdragon CPU
- 0.13s/1.3s for M2 CPU
- 0.08s/0.31s for M2 GPU
- 0.22s/2s for i7-12700H CPU
- 0.35s/0.88s for NVidia T1200 GPU
- 0.3s/3.1s for i5-10400 CPU
- 0.2s/0.75s for NVidia RTX 3060 GPU
To nobody’s surprise, the M2 max is the fastest CPU in this bunch. Somewhat surprisingly, it is by far the fastest GPU as well, easily beating the dedicated NVidia GPUs. Very surprisingly, the little Surface tablet CPU was faster than the workstation and gaming CPU and GPU for editing tasks. Only for exporting resolutions did the dedicated GPUs best it. Darktable on the Surface tablet is in fact a joy to use!