A number of updates have been rolled out for some popular “Pro” apps for the M1-powered Macs this week—including Adobe Photoshop, which had been going through a couple of months of beta testing prior to this. In the same train of thought, Blackmagic has also added universal app support for Macs running on M1 chips, and you’re now supposed to get better performance on the M1-powered machines.
Are you on an M1 device? If you are, here’s a quick breakdown. If not, well—the updates are still pretty interesting.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe promises a number of significant improvements on M1 Macs, with faster performance compared to other machines:
“Starting today, Photoshop runs natively on Macs powered by the M1 chip and takes advantage of the performance improvements built into this new architecture. Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems. Our tests covered a broad scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which all feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip.”
However, it’s worth noting that a number of features still don’t run natively on the M1 chip. Adobe says that most of these are newly-introduced features, including Invite to Edit, Cloud Documents, and Preset Syncing. However, the company promises that the features will be ported over at some point, so you’ll need to be a tad patient if you want the entire range of Photoshop features on an M1 Mac.
DaVinci Resolve 17.1
Blackmagic Design has also added universal support for DaVinci Resolve 17.1, and the app now runs natively on the M1-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13″, and Mac mini. The optimised app is now supposed to perform at an improvement of five times compared to previous generations, while the update also adds support for hardware accelerated encoding if H.265 10-bit 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 formats on supported Intel platforms.
To download, DaVinci Resolve 17.1 is now available for free. Click here to find out more.
Octane X
One final update for you. Octane X, an update on the OctaneRender engine from Otoy, has now been launched on the Mac App Store with native support for M1 Macs (and other Macs running on macOS Big Sur). Now, Otoy’s latest graphics rendering engine comes with spectrally correct GPU path tracing to help professionals and creatives in film, gaming, motion graphics, and so on.
Octane X is available for free on the Mac App Store, which means that all Octane X Enterprise standalone features are available to every Mac, while there are two exclusive offers to Octane X Prime and Enterprise subscriptions—exclusively for Mac users.
“Using the new Octane X app on the Mac App Store, Mac users now have one-click access to all the tools needed to package and render their artwork on the RNDR network – the industry’s first decentralized GPU rendering platform, enabling Mac artists to simply and effortlessly publish their NFT CryptoArt on the blockchain.”
To find out more, click here.
