OpenGL and Metal?

[Jeremy Bohn]

A question in another thread got me thinking... what are the recommended settings for OpenGL and Metal? My 2017 27" iMac has a Radeon Pro 580 with 8GB RAM. I checked all 3 apps and this is what I have right now:

Designer & Publisher - Display: OpenGL, Metal Acceleration Enabled

Photo  - Display: Metal (can't be changed, popup menu is dimmed), Metal Acceleration Enabled

And what's the difference between Display and Hardware acceleration? Is this explained somewhere?

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Jeremy Bohn said:

And what's the difference between Display and Hardware acceleration?

Basically, display acceleration improves rendering performance (how quickly the screen display updates) by using the GPU's hardware for that, while hardware acceleration offloads certain computationally intensive tasks from the CPU to the GPU before they are rendered to the display.

The latter can improve performance enormously (for supported GPU's) because those GPU's can efficiently process thousands of computations in parallel while CPU cores are extremely limited in this respect.

[Jeremy Bohn]

I figured something like that. Still unsure if I should still be using OpenGL which I understand is the older tech. And why is Display: Metal the only option in Photo?

[markw]

11 minutes ago, Jeremy Bohn said:

And why is Display: Metal the only option in Photo?

If you deselect 'Hardware Acceleration' in Photo, then the other Display rendering option become available.

[Jeremy Bohn]

Ah, interesting that only Photo behaves that way.

Well since Photo locks the display to Metal when Hardware Acceleration is on, maybe I should change Designer and Publisher to match.

I also assume I can ignore "integrated GPU"? It's currently disabled on all 3 as well.