Pixelmator Pro 2.0 Updated for Big Sur and Apple Silicon

Pixelmator:

The Pixelmator Pro editing engine is powered by high-performance Metal code, so we can take advantage of the unified memory architecture of the M1 chip to bring you much speedier and much more responsive image editing. Machine learning tasks like ML Super Resolution are now up to a staggering 15 times faster on the new Macs. And, as a Universal app, Pixelmator Pro 2.0 runs natively on both M1 and Intel-based devices, so we’re completely ready for the new era of Mac.

I can vouch for that — I was using Pixelmator Pro 1.8 through Rosetta when I initially started testing the M1 MacBook Pro last week. It worked fine, and felt comparable to running it on an Intel Mac. But ML Super Resolution — a truly mindbendingly cool feature — went from a “worth the wait” type of feature running the old version via Rosetta, to a “wait, is it really that fast now?” feature running version 2.0 natively on the M1 MacBook Pro.

Most of the M1 Mac benchmarks we’ve been seeing are testing the CPU and GPU, because that’s something we can compare head-to-head with Intel Macs and Windows PCs. But ML features that run through the Neural Engine are new territory. 15 times faster sounds too good to be true, but it’s true. And Pixelmator Pro’s ML Super Resolution feature isn’t some weird esoteric thing — it’s the sort of feature anyone who ever upscales photos might want to use.

★ Thursday, 19 November 2020