[MacPorts] #67608: Performance of QGIS3 on Apple Silicon

[MacPorts]

#67608: Performance of QGIS3 on Apple Silicon
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 Reporter:  news24lor  |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  update     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  Normal     |  Milestone:
Component:  ports      |    Version:
 Keywords:             |       Port:  qgis3
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 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

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/67608>
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