I began using ArcGIS Pro back in April or so. First I didn't really like the ribbon layout as it gives me a strong vibe of Microsoft products. But learning new things has always been exciting for me, therefore I kept at it.
Over the last couple of months, I found that ArcGIS Pro is so much faster at handling raster. For example, when I used ArcMap to do Extract by Mask on high-resolution aerial files, I had to leave the computer on after work so that it could be finished the next day. Sometimes I even had to leave it on for the entire weekend. However, now with ArcGIS Pro, similar tasks won't take longer than 10 mins. That difference is insane to me.
Does anyone else have similar experience? I'm wondering if anyone knows what fundamental changes Esri has made in ArcGIS Pro. Did they change the algorithms for most tasks? I find it unlikely since the ArcPy code is the same.
I don't have any software development experience, but I really want to learn a little bit more about it. Can anyone share with me how such a dramatic change transpired?
Best Answer
Let's turn some of the comments into a partial answer. I'm an Esri employee but not involved in the guts of ArcGIS Pro so I'm going by what I've heard over the years and can find in the help.
ArcGIS Pro uses an Esri-built graphics engine, optimized for GIS data and which uses a GPU if available. ArcGIS Desktop uses the Microsoft graphics engine which had some limitations that we could not work around (transparency when printing).
ArcGIS Pro is natively 64-bit unlike ArcGIS Desktop. Thus, 64-bit background processing is no longer needed. Tools are run asynchronously allowing other work in the application to be performed while a tool is running.
Some tools support parallel processing.
I do not know why rasters in particular seem to perform faster. Tools had to be ported/rewritten for Pro so there may have been some optimization that occurred.