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by mooman219 2534 days ago
Why target largely unsupported technologies like Metal Compute over say OpenCL with a _much_ larger market share? You mentioned the complaint about Nvidia CUDA limiting GPU support to Nvidia only, but Metal Compute limits you to a subset of AMD cards to a subset of Mac versions in the wild.
1 comments
csaba72 2534 days ago
You are right with the OpenCL vs Metal thing. OpenCL is supported in VectorStyler (see Preferences - Performance section). But running on a Mac (for now), requires Metal, as Apple deprecated OpenCL. OpenCL is still there, but performance on Macs is way better with Metal (this might be intentional from Apple).

OpenCL also had some Mac driver issues with some 2014 NVidia iMacs, which actually caused problems. So for now I have Metal support, and OpenCL is still there but not as good as Metal on Macs.

As for CUDA, most iMacs are with AMD at this time, and Metal still serves good both NVidia and AMD on Macs of course. Of course Metal is far from perfect, but as a small dev, Apple kind of puts you into a corner with that one.

Thinking outside of Macs (Windows and Linux), I would like OpenCL to be the choice, as it is already implemented in VectorStyler, but as I said, I don't know how much extra steps would require from the user (installing drivers, etc). CUDA is a great choice, outside of Macs, and it might be part of a Windows port.

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