Performance of QGIS3 on Apple Silicon

[news24lor]

We are in a time of transition in processors and I wanted to share in this space some QGIS benchmarks with different processors. I used QGIS3 found here in Macports, compiled for ARM 64 bit processor compared to the distributed version which is still compiled for Intel 64 bit processor.

The version of QGIS is the same, 3.28.7 and all plugins were disabled to have the same starting conditions.

The Ram present in all computers is the same: 32 GB.

The computers used are three:

Mac mini with Intel i7 processor

MacBook Pro with Intel i9 processor

MacBook Pro with Apple M2Pro processor

In the M2Pro processor I ran the standard version for Intel and then with emulation via Rosetta and the native version compiled in MacPorts with all the libraries compiled for the M2Pro processor.

To get the benchmark I ran a Python code containing 95 QGIS algorithms performing work on both raster and vector layers. Quite a heavy tool to see the performance. The best result has the lowest times.

The results are these:

Mac mini with Intel i7: Execution completed in 2501.81 seconds (41 minutes 42 seconds)

MacBook Pro with Intel i9: Execution completed in 2824.35 seconds (47 minutes 4 seconds)

MacBook Pro with Apple M2Pro (Rosetta emulation): Execution completed in 2438.66 seconds (40 minutes 39 seconds)

MacBook Pro with Apple M2Pro (MacPorts version - ARM64): Execution completed in 1492.94 seconds (24 minutes 53 seconds)

This is a fairly extreme but very interesting benchmark for those who use GIS professionally. The visible fact is the great gain in time using the native version of QGIS, about 40% less and then the almost equivalence between the times of the native Intel version and the one emulated via Rosetta in the M2Pro processor.

Of course I should run this benchmark also on the latest generations of Intel (i9, Xeon , etc.) but these results are really very interesting.

My greatest thanks for those involved in porting QGIS and related libraries. Thank you!

Ciao Lorenzo

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Trac is for bug reports and feature requests... is there something you are asking to have changed in the qgis3 port or just sharing your experiences? You filed this as an "Update" but according to port livecheck qgis3 there is no update for qgis3 available.

[news24lor]

Hi

You can move this post to another section but I don't know where.
I have only included some interesting information since QGIS is widely used and I have not yet read the real performance differences between different processors. Now we have an idea.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

Creating a wiki page might be a good option for sharing this kind of information.