[xenophya]

hello all

just wondering if anyone has knowledge or information on how the new system level technologies in Snow Leopard, namely Grand Central Despatch and Open CL may (positively) impact how MXWR works on quad and octo macs??

I wonder if there are some improvements in v2.0 (or maybe even 3???) that will be able to fully utilise the potential of the CPUs we have, and run 64 bit as well?

I've got SL but not had a chance to install it on my mac pro yet, so not been able to do any testing . .

thoughts anyone?? (or info from NL?? please?? please???) I suppose we're all really keen to squeeze more render power out of our machines !!

thanks,

David

[dmeyer]

I am seeing a 3-5% speedup after upgrading to Snow Leopard here.

Whether or not GCD and OCL impact Maxwell performance depends exclusively on whether the NL team chooses to spend development time on it in the next versions.

[msantana]

Hello David,

This topic pops up from time to time. I share your excitement about this, and I am no Next-Limit insider, but I don't think we will see Maxwell Render taking advantage of Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL soon.

The reasons I believe will be more practical than technical. As far as I know, Maxwell was NOT written with Mac OS X as the main target, that being Windows (or maybe even Linux!).

Anyway, the development choices that Next Limit has are obviously limited to what they can offer in the three platforms. As you can probably infer, OpenCL and GCD are obviously not available in Windows and Linux. So this means that any development time that NextLimit spends on this will only benefit Mac users, which is great for us, but not so great for the rest (who are probably the majority).

Now, there is no technical hurdle that impedes a team or a firm implementing OpenCl and GCD on Windows and or Linux. For business reasons, I don't think it will ever take off in Windows, but may happen in Linux.

In addition, Intel has been proposing a similar technology to OpenCL and from discussions posted on this very board, NextLimit guys have said they know about them, so, it may be possible at some point that we see Next Limit adopting this (Larrabee).

In short, for practical reasons I don't think it will happen soon, but who knows, I don't work for Next Limit so I haven't seen the code and may be very wrong!