Author Topic: Slow PM6 scroll when max window size for contact sheet &/or preview on 5k Mac's  (Read 1825 times)

Offline bfeinzimer

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Scrolling / culling of photos in the preview window or the contact sheet is laughably slow, jarring and lagged when I am drawing too many photos in the contact sheet OR have the preview or contact sheet as full screen on a 5k displayed Apple M1 Mac Studio. If I either maximize the contact sheet to the entire display or turn thumbnail sizes down too small, either action results in PM having to draw up more photo simultaneously. Disabling HQ thumbnails seems to help but doesn't completely fix this and I need HQ thumbnails.

The performance on my 14" M1 MacBook Pro works mostly fluidly even at full screen contact sheet at the smallest thumbnail sizing. By logic this don't make sense since the Mac Studio is pushing more power. Pushing the same settings on the Mac Studio on a 5k screen shows at native resolution gives unusable performance lagging. After going back with *helpful* PM support to eliminate any other possible causes (both machines working off of photos on an internal SSD), I believe it came down to PM not being native for Apple's Metal and therefor the performance suffers. When pushing the desktop machine, PM uses all of the CPU cores but none of the GPU.

The compromise if I want seamless scroll performance and high quality thumbnails is to reduce the contact sheet size to not show too many photos at once, either by keeping the thumbnial size BIG enough &/or the window SMALL enough to limit how many photos are being drawn at once. The screenshot shows relative window/thumbail sizes that result in good performance on the Mac Studio.

I'm posting as I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing a similar issue for themselves.

https://forums.camerabits.com//index.php?topic=12409.0

It seems to be related to this issue raised in 2019 as the tips Kirk gave to Turn off "Always make current Preview visible in Contact Sheet and Turn off "Synchronize single selection between Preview and Contact Sheet" make a big difference in performance still. I also need those features on.

« Last Edit: June 20, 2023, 03:34:54 PM by bfeinzimer »

Offline tgray

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So I just got finished setting up a 4k screen, which I'm running at 2560x1440 in high quality mode.  Should be a similar load to a 5k screen.  Scrolling on folder is pretty fluid, but scrolling on search results in my catalog is very jerky and laggy.  My other screen is a native 2560x1440 screen and scrolling there is very fast.  No real difference with high quality thumbnails on/off, thumbnail size, etc.  I have sharpening turned off.

What is strange is that when I run the new 4k screen at low resolution 2560x1440, scrolling is still slow.  I've tried the screen both with USB-C and DisplayPort. This is on a new M2 Max Mac Studio with 64 GB RAM.

Not sure if you see the same scrolling behavior on file browser contact sheets and catalog search result contact sheets.

Camerabits, any ideas?  Is this behavior to be expected?

Offline ahoward

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So I just got finished setting up a 4k screen, which I'm running at 2560x1440 in high quality mode.  Should be a similar load to a 5k screen.

Apple provides a warning that when you use that resolution (and some others) on a 4K display, that it may introduce a performance hit. Id certainly say that when in full screen mode, scrolling when my display is in the "larger text" mode is smoother than using the higher quality 2560x1440 mode, but if I switch to 2560x1440(low resolution) it is the smoothest of all 3 of these options (but of course, its now low-resolution and everything is fuzzy).

That said, there shouldn't really be a difference between a Contact Sheet open from the navigator and one created by using one of the Catalog functions such as searching or Browsing. Do you see a performance difference when you use Browse, Filter, or Collections as well, or just when using Search?

Offline bfeinzimer

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Ultimately it seems the larger your resolution AND drawing a lesser amount of images on your contact sheet (bigger thumbnails and/or a smaller contact sheet window) scrolling performance improves. when too many thumbnails are being drawn, culling crawls.

After one on one troubleshooting with CB support, it seems the issues might be related to PM6 not being comparable with Apple Metal, since the dev team at CB is small and can only write for one cross platform language. I’d pay and upgrade fee to get an apple native app, and i’d past foot an iOS app, something I’ve heard other users ask for.