First performance tests of M1 chip in Affinity Photo.Little by little, although the first Macs with Apple Silicon are yet to officially arrive, comparisons and benchmarks are appearing. This time we found the difference in performance of the Affinity Photo app on a Mac with M1 compared to a 2019 iMac, the results are impressive.

An improvement of 42% and without knowing on which Mac the M1 runs

For those who do not know it, Affinity Photo is an app developed by the Seriff company considered one of the best in the field of photo editing on both Mac and PC. The app has its own benchmark so that we can get an idea of ​​what performance we are going to have on the machine where we run it. Until now we could use these tests to compare two Macs, but now, with the adaptation that the company has made of its app for Apple Silicon, it gives us a new source of data. The screenshots that accompany this article belong to the user Andy Somerfield, who has published them on twitter and offers us a very interesting perspective of these new Macs. Andy compares two computers, a 2019 iMac with a 3.7 GHz Intel 6-core processor and an AMD 580X and a computer with an M1 processor that he does not give the details about. The differences could not be more stark. The test measures performance in both vectors and rasters and a single core CPU and multicore set.

Bear in mind that the vectors are used by the CPU, while the rasters are used by the GPU for performance reasons. So the combination looks like this, the units are in points:

• Vectors on a single core: 310 Intel and 504 M1.
• Multicore vectors: 1515 Intel and 2032 M1.
• Rasters on a single GPU core: 8133 Intel and 6955 M1.
• Combined in a single core: 407 Intel and 532 M1.
• Combined in multiple core: 5568 Intel and 7907 M1.

The numbers speak for themselves, but we are talking about performance improvements that reach 62% in some specific cases and that in the combined and multicore they are 42%. An improvement that is already being confirmed by other tests that other users are being able to perform with other units. We still need to know which computer the M1 chip from these tests is mounted on. Final conclusions will vary greatly if it is a MacBook Air without active cooling or if it is a Mac mini or a 13-inch MacBook Pro. In any case, the performance of the processor itself is more than remarkable. It is clear that what Apple has achieved with the M1 chips is impressive and, moreover, only the beginning of a series of improvements. For now the company has presented the first computers, let’s hope they will be able to make more powerful computers like the 16- inch MacBook Pros that are rumored for March,