I bought my iPad Pro because it offered the smoothest RAW photo proofing process...

mceachen · on Oct 27, 2020

Faster CPUs certainly help everything go faster, but what you're asking of the CPU may matter much more than how fast the CPU is.

RAW processing is actually a really interesting application, and rendering time depends heavily on what you do with the bits from the sensor.

If you use non-linear interpolation, 2-50x the time to build.

If you do highlight recovery, 2-5x the time to build.

If you only need half the native resolution, build time may be reduced 2-4x.

Basically "viewing a RAW image" can take 100 milliseconds or 15 seconds (on the same hardware!), depending on how you're interpreting the sensor data.

(Source: playing with dcraw and libraw to rasterize raw images for PhotoStructure)