Mac performance with Oxygen Editor

[EvanHOlson]

Does anyone know if it makes any difference as far as Oxygen Editor performance whether you use a MacBook Pro with an M1 vs M1 Pro vs M1 Max chip? This includes things like DITA-OT processing time, ability to handle very large files, and any other processor intensive actions done with Oxygen Editor. I don't work with 3D or Video. Oxygen Editor is my primary app and I do a little SVG editing in Illustrator.

Also, it Oxygen Editor 24 fully supportive of Apple Silicon?

[adrian]

Hello,

We have not tested Oxygen yet on MacBook Pro with M1 Pro or M1 Max.
For Oxygen there may not be a significant difference in performance between M1 vs M1 Pro vs M1 Max chips, at least not CPU-wise. Oxygen itself isn't optimized for more than 4 cores (as of v24) for CPU intensive tasks. But if the system as a whole (graphics, storage, etc) is faster, Oxygen will also benefit from it. However, M1 Max is probably overkill if Oxygen is your primary app.

The ability to handle large files is directly proportional to the Java heap memory allocated for Oxygen. On macOS Oxygen uses the Java default of 25% of the system memory, so 2GB of heap for a base MacBook with 8GB of RAM. For large files 4GB of heap or more is recommended (default for a MacBook with 16GB of RAM).
The heap memory that Oxygen uses can be adjusted via a parameter in the Info.plist file of the app. So you can still run Oxygen with 4GB of Java heap, even on a 8GB Mac.

DITA-OT processing time is unlikely to be much different between the M1 chips. But this may depend on Java and the DITA-OT version being used. Again you shouldn't forget about memory especially if you are producing PDF.

Also, is Oxygen Editor 24 fully supportive of Apple Silicon?

Yes, starting with v23.1 Oxygen provides a specific distribution for Apple Silicon. Oxygen is not yet available as an Universal app (that runs natively on both Intel and M1 CPUs), but there are separate distributions for the two architectures.
Note that the performance difference is significant for M1 between the Apple silicon distribution of Oxygen and the default (Intel) one that runs on top of Rosetta 2. For M1 (Apple silicon) make sure you download and install the "macOS 11 and later (Apple silicon)" distribution from our download page.


IMHO, for editing large files a MacBook (even Air) with 16GB of RAM and any M1 chip should be more than enough for Oxygen as long as you're running the Apple silicon distribution. Moving up to an M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM might be beneficial overall, but see if your budget allows it.

Regards,
Adrian

[EvanHOlson]

It sounds like I could run Oxygen just as well with a MacBook Air or a 13 inch MacBook Pro as long as it has 16 GB memory. I will still tell my bosses that I "need" the MacBook Pro 16 inch with the M1 Max chip and 64GB of memory and then I can negotiate from there.

Thanks so much.

-Evan