Helicon Soft Forum

I use Nikon Z8 and Z9.

If I shoot in Helicon Remote and stack in Helicon Focus then the rendering times for 50 photos are:

RAW - 2 minutes and 10 seconds

JPG (Fine) - 18 seconds

Why is there this big difference?

Because raw images take much more time to decode. They are also 16-bit images so they take longer to process than the 8-bit JPEG files, but that difference in itself is small.
Go to Preferences - Performance, make sure "Parallel image loading" is set to either Auto or Enabled. Try both options, see which is faster (it will depend on your hardware, but generally Enabled should be a bit faster).

Enabled is a few seconds faster.

Processed on a Mac Mini M4 Pro with 24 GB.

This is as fast as your M4 CPU can go, you need a bigger/faster CPU for faster renders. Note that the images have to only be decoded once, and subsequent renders of the same source images will be much quicker.