Is Apple Mac Studio M1 Max good for graphics design?

Interesting, although mine doesn't behave at all as fluidly. I did notice his has 64Mb RAM whereas mine has 32. I honestly thought this would have been more than enough when I bought it, given the fact that my old iMac has 8.

The other thing - and most important - is that he's not working with 200Mb Photoshop files with many many layers, text and layer styles as I do. Layer styles in particular are processor heavy but they are an essential part of my process.

Perhaps I should have bought a 64Mb Ultra but I was using my old 8Mb system as a yardstick and thought that multiplying my processing power by about a hundred would have been enough.

Make sure it’s Photoshop 23.4 or newer, and not running via Rosetta.

My Mac Studio M1 Max 32 GB/512 GB shredded my old 2014 Mac mini and my I7 HP Victus . Clearly you have a problem with your software or perhaps your Mac Studio. The improvement on photo processing with the Mac Studio with Topez AI dropped from about 2 minutes on the HP to about 27 seconds with the same benchmark on my M1 Max Studio.

If you Google this question I believe the answer is yes but look at the online reviews.

No. Nothing wrong. I have gone through every possible "fix" for poor Photoshop performance and nothing has helped. I am up to date with everything and it is slow, slow, slow. Really bad. I have had to switch off the GPU because images in Photoshop display as scrambled or black with it enabled.

Even so, text breaks up, artefacts appear on screen, objects don't move or transform fluidly... it's bad. I'm really worried about when I have to return to one of my bigger 300Mb files that I used to do on my old iMac. They will kill this Mac Studio.

This evening I am working on a small 23Mb sized file. Scrolling with the hand tool is painfully jerky. Every single mouse click is sticky and comes with a delay before anything happens. This is a brand new Mac Studio. M1 Max, 32Mb RAM. Four times more RAM than my significantly faster 12 year old iMac.

I can see me moving this thing on pretty quickly.

This is an example of a person running Photoshop and several other apps at the same time and no issues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6EJgjm70v0.

I agree with Grant Bennet-Alder that posting the Etrecheck report may be helpful.

I'll have a look at doing it tomorrow. In the meantime I've been back on Photoshop and Illustrator. Disaster. A 10Mb file in Photoshop produced a stuttering, jerky slider action on Smart sharpen - on a super simple line image. Then I decided to convert it to a vector in Illustrator. Did a trace, noticed all actions and clicks were just as sticky as in Photoshop, then tried to carry out a Simplify operation on the trace - bear in mind this Illustrator file is less than 1 Mb. And it crashed. Had to force quit. This Mac Studio is the worst, most appallingly bad performing computer I have ever owned. Fair enough it might be some of the other creative software causing a conflict but maybe not... I bought it because it's a "creative's powerhouse." well, no it isn't. And I'm so disappointed and angry at how bad it is. I'm frankly horrified it's just as bad in Illustrator as in Photoshop. In fact, it's worse. I was in Premiere Pro earlier and dropped in an empty adjustment layer. Nothing on it. Went to drag it out to the correct length... jerk, jerk, stutter, stutter, stick, crash.

<< I have had to switch off the GPU because images in Photoshop display as scrambled or black with it enabled. >>

That is NOT expected and NOT normal. You may have a software conflict, or possibly even a hardware issue.

Consider running Etrecheck and posting its pre-sanitized report.

Consider running Apple Diagnostics.

The only non-Adobe software I have installed is Cubase Pro 12. Which is a monster, especially with all the plugins I use. But I never have it running while I am using Photoshop or Premiere Pro. I don't have any other software installed. Cubase runs perfectly. I have bugs and glitches everywhere however. Currently all my File>Open dialogs are greyed out yet still accessible. It's a disappointing experience on this Mac Studio, it really is. I'm actively looking for something else.

I will run Etrecheck (again) tomorrow and look in to Apple Diagnostics.

On no evidence, look for repeating patterns in the Console app logs of system activity. Specifically, look for log patterns that might point to an app repeatedly crashing and restarting. And Creative Cloud is crashing more than usual.

To complete you 'due diligence', two more steps are needed.

1) run the Diagnostic, which does not detect everything, but does a check for GROSS Hardware errors. "no fault found" does not mean "all is well".

2) run in Safe mode, a quick way to run where most third-party add-ons are not added on.

If Photoshop behaves better without all those add-ons from CuBase loaded, it adds weight to the theory that Cubase add-ons are the source of the Photoshop problems.

OK I've run diagnostics and no issues were reported. I have now also run Safe Mode and found that performance is no better. I have the GPU switched back on again in Photoshop and so far I've had no black images. That's an intermittent issue however. If an image does open as completely black in Photoshop I can never do anything with it and simply have to close the file.

Below are two screengrabs of what happens to text and artwork in Photoshop if I try to scale or rotate it. One is a fully rasterized layer and the other is live text. Same issue on both. This happens in Safe Mode as well as Normal, and with the GPU activated or not. Also whether the Free Transform is Legacy or not.

This sort of image fracturing is concurrent with generally slower than expected performance on the Mac Studio, as well as issues in Illustrator which have caused beachballs and crashes on very small and simple files.

You can see now why I gave my original answer to this thread.

The only program that runs smoothly on my Mac Studio is Cubase. And that, I believe, is under Rosetta.

No. I have Photoshop on my 2023 Mac Studio M1 Max 32GB and it is noticeably slower than on my 12 year old iMac running Photoshop 6.

You must have something wrong.

If Etrechck is familiar, consider posting its report to a reply here on the forums. Other Readers may look at it in a different light, and see different things.