State of ARM Support for Puget Bench

Introduction

With the recent launch of the NVIDIA RTX Spark™, we have received several queries from users about whether our Puget Bench testing tools support ARM devices.

Our benchmark launcher and scripts have been fully ARM-native and compatible since Puget Bench for Creators 1.4.30, with the latest 1.4.50 version having no known issues with ARM. However, the host applications we are testing (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) do not always have full ARM support. That can cause issues with the benchmarks due to missing features or instability.

To help guide our users looking to benchmark Snapdragon and/or RTX Spark devices, we wanted to provide a one-stop resource outlining the current (as of October 2026) compatibility with Puget Bench on both the benchmark and host application side. Since software developers are still actively working on ARM compatibility and feature parity with x86 systems, we will outline the current situation for both the latest release and relevant beta versions. We fully expect this document to become outdated over time, especially as software updates allow more application/benchmark combinations to work without issue.

One thing to note is that many ARM devices on the market are considered low- to mid-tier in performance compared to a desktop and may require a manual adjustment to the benchmark timeout. If you are running into problems with the benchmark reporting the timeout being hit, you can adjust this setting by doing the following:

1. Click on the Settings icon in the lower-left corner of the Puget Bench launcher
2. Adjust the benchmark timeout from the 300-second default to 600 seconds or higher
3. Click “Close” (the changed settings save automatically)

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop has been available in an ARM-native version for many years and has historically worked well with ARM devices on Windows. Currently, there are no known issues with either the release (v27.11) or beta (v28.0-beta) versions of Photoshop.

Adobe Lightroom Classic

Adobe Lightroom Classic does NOT currently have an ARM-native version and will instead run in emulated mode. This means that while any results you get on ARM devices will be accurate to what end users can expect in Lightroom Classic, it isn’t a great application to test if you want to highlight what ARM-based systems are capable of.

Despite this, overall compatibility is very good at the moment. Some ARM-based systems may time out on certain tests, but that can be worked around by increasing the benchmark timeout settings. That performance should also improve in the future if, or when, an ARM-native version is released.

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is available in an ARM-native build, and additional integrations like Cinema 4D are also compatible as of v26.5. However, due to a bug with the current v26.5 release version for compositions utilizing the Advanced 3D rendering engine (exposed by the “3D Camera Explode” benchmark test), the Extended benchmark preset will not currently work on any Windows-based device, including ARM.

However, this issue has been fixed in the After Effects beta, specifically version 27.1.0.021 (released 10/21/2026). While beta versions of applications are tricky to use for testing, since they are works in progress and performance may change, the After Effects beta is currently the best way to benchmark ARM devices.

Note that some features currently unavailable in the ARM version of After Effects are not tested by Puget Bench. More information is available on Adobe’s support for ARM-based Windows devices page.

Adobe Premiere

The current release version of Adobe Premiere (v26.5) is ARM-native, but lacks support for RAW codecs on ARM devices. The latest beta (v27.1-beta) improves this, and adds support for all RAW codecs tested in Puget Bench except Sony X-OCN. Because of this, the current release version of Premiere is not able to run Puget Bench for Premiere Pro, and the beta v27.1-beta is required to run only the Standard benchmark preset.

Note that some features currently unavailable in the ARM version of Premiere are not tested by Puget Bench. More information is available on Adobe’s support for ARM-based Windows devices page.

Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Studio

DaVinci Resolve Studio has had ARM support for several years and generally has good feature parity with x86. However, mid- and low-performance platforms often have issues with the difficulty of the Puget Bench Extended tests. Unified memory architectures like Snapdragon and RTX Spark may also be slow, but they can generally complete the Extended tests as long as you increase the default benchmark timeout.

Summary

Even though ARM has been available for several years, both Adobe and Blackmagic continue to work on achieving feature parity with x86 and improving overall performance. While our benchmarks are fully ARM-native and run on both Snapdragon and NVIDIA RTX Spark devices, many host applications still have issues. Most of the problems stem from a lack of support for specific features that our benchmarks test, which should improve over time.

For any hardware reviewers utilizing this post as a resource to plan testing for ARM devices, we currently recommend the following:

• Puget Bench for Photoshop
  • No known issues

• Puget Bench for After Effects
  • Latest After Effects beta required for full benchmark support

• Puget Bench for Premiere Pro
  • Latest Premiere beta required for RAW and RTX Spark GPU support
  • Standard preset only

• Puget Bench for DaVinci Resolve
  • May require timeouts to be increased

If you want to see how your system performs in any of these applications, Puget Bench is completely free for end users, with special licenses available for press. You can also compare your results against thousands of systems in our benchmark database.

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