Mac vs. Windows Performance

[JoshuaLuty]

Are there any benchmarks comparing Dorico’s performance on Mac (M-series processors) and Windows, either formal or user-submitted?

I have an M1 MacBook Pro and am curious what would be a requisite build for similar performance on Windows and x86 processors. The performance differences seemed like night and day when I made the switch a few years ago, but may need to switch back to Windows for various reasons.

[DanielMuzMurray]

There are a few threads about this if my memory serves me correct, I’m not sure what keywords to use though.

[benwiggy]

Here’s a recent discussion (so discussing performance on v5), where I’ve collated some data.

Processing slowness

Hopefully, I’ve collated the data correctly, adding my stats, on a Mac Mini M2 Pro, 32Gb RAM. What’s interesting is: Creating a New Flow is much slower than Duplicating one! Also, not every task is faster/slower by the same proportion on a given computer. Some tasks might be faster and others slower. [Screenshot] I got lucky with that Adding a PT time. Additional results were around 7200. But still weirdly fast, proportionally. Condensing is a lot of work. It’s also true that particular ty…

You’ll see that the M-series Macs are just a smidge faster than Fred’s AMD 5950x, which has 16 cores (32 threads)!

The big thread about performance benchmarks is here, but much of the data is historical.

Dorico performance benchmarks?

I’m getting ready to upgrade my AMD CPU. I was thinking it would be handy to work up a series of benchmarks to measure Dorico’s performance on any particular machine. I know there are plenty of benchmark tests available, but I mostly only care about Dorico in this case. I know it would have to be a little informal, but I’d be really interested… both to see how the upgrade affects performance, and to see how other users’ machine perform. If these tests were sufficiently taxing, they could be a …

A good single-core speed is as important as having lots of cores. Having 24 cores at 1 Ghz won’t be as useful as 12 cores at 2 Ghz.

[FredGUnn]

As Ben mentioned, much of Dorico can’t make use of multiple cores, so for speedy Dorico work, you’re probably best off getting something with really fast single thread performance, like one of these near the top of this list:

PassMark CPU Benchmarks - Single Thread Performance

[benwiggy]

@FredGUnn

much of Dorico can’t make use of multiple cores,

I think it’s more accurate to say that there are limits to how much you will gain by throwing more cores at the problem. Tasks like Laying out of the music on the page and Condensing involve a lot of sequential processing, where one thing has to be done before the next.

For the current small score I’m working on, Dorico is using 55 threads, each of which could theoretically be spread of different cores (if you had enough). I’ve only got 10 cores, but none of them is using more than a few % of max capacity, and I don’t know how many threads one core can handle at a time, or actually what the % is a measurement of.