Graphics card specifics

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, BofG said:

1: most people don't understand the concept of an API.

2: most people are unable to recognise poorly written software.

This isn't just about API's or how well-written the apps are.

To begin with, there are several different flavors of hardware acceleration, but the one relevant here for Windows users is OpenCL. It provides a generalized, abstract framework for performing various computing functions in parallel on a variety of devices, each of which typically has several computing units, each consisting of one or more processing elements.

Device vendors like AMD, Nvidia, & Intel are free to decide how their devices will be divided into different units & elements, but there is no one 'universal' architecture that all of these devices use, even from the same vendor. Apps don't know anything about those abstractions; they just call functions that are handed off to the driver provided by the device vendor.

So basically, all a well written app can do is determine which functions can be performed in parallel & optionally hand them off to whatever driver is installed. The app can't do anything about bugs in the driver or know which functions might trigger one or more of them that could crash or hang the app.

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, BofG said:

Not true. Check the second FAQ link from the first reply in this thread.

I don't understand what you mean. If you are talking about this reply, in that post @Lee D wrote:

Quote

In the 1.9 update to our apps, hardware acceleration (OpenCL) was added, this should increase performance on Windows.

The FAQ link in that post leads to this post by @Leighthis topic. maybe I am missing something but I do not see anything there that contradicts my comment that on Windows, hardware acceleration is dependent on OpenCL.

 

16 minutes ago, BofG said:

Again not true. The API is all that the program interfaces with. The driver is abstracted behind this.

Yes, the API is the only thing the app interfaces with. A direct consequence of this is it is the API that then hands the function off to the driver. So what is not true about what I said?

[v_kyr]

Quote

...
Every OpenCL application needs to link to a library containing OpenCL’s standard functions. This library is called OpenCL.dll on Windows, libOpenCL.so on Linux, and OpenCL on Mac OS systems. If your development process uses makefiles, your makefile must identify the name and location of the OpenCL library.

But you don’t have to identify the vendor-specific libraries that interface with the vendor’s hardware. The SDK makes these libraries, installable client drivers (ICDs), available so that the OpenCL runtime can find them. In Windows, the SDK adds registry entries identifying the ICDs’ names. In Linux, the ICDs are identified by text files in the /etc/OpenCL/vendors directory.
...

People interested in the overall OpenCL materia should better read some well explaining book about OpenCL programming, which ideally then also explains the whole history, architecture and usage behind it, instead of looking just at superficial Wikipedia articles or the like.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, BofG said:

The app doesn't hand off to a driver. It makes function calls against the well defined API.

Nobody said the app hands the call off directly to the driver, but as I said, it is the API that hands the function call off to the driver.

2 hours ago, BofG said:

,,, and it's all disabled right now (I think?) on the newer Radeon cards.

From what @Mark Ingramhere, it is only Radeon RX 5000 series and later cards that are incompatible, & from several other discussions it appears to be because there is a bug in the drivers for those cards, which AMD is aware of.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, BofG said:

DirectX isn't OpenCL.

No, it is not, but as explained in both the text description below this video & in the video itself starting around the 4:43 mark, hardware acceleration on the Windows version of AP is provided via OpenCL. Quoting directly from the description (emphasis added):

Quote

Take advantage of hardware acceleration to speed up rendering performance using Metal Compute on Mac and OpenCL on Windows.

FWIW, the link to the video was included in one of the "Learn more" links the Affinity Photo for Windows - 1.9.0 announcement topic:

Quote

Windows hardware (GPU) acceleration (for users running Windows 10 (April 2020 update or later) with a Direct3D feature level 12.0 capable card) (learn more)

Browsing through the links to newer versions in the Latest Affinity releases on each platform by store topic, I could not find any indication that they have added support for hardware acceleration through any other means than through OpenCL since then.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, BofG said:

Thanks for the info, I hadn't seen that. I had read from the other thread that they was using DXCore, which is what made me think it was along the DirectX side of things.

As I understand it (which easily could be wrong) in the Windows version of AP, hardware acceleration requires a GPU & a driver that supports OpenGL OpenCL, DirectX 12 level 12, & Windows version 10.0.19041 or later.

I do not know where DXCore fits into this.

EDIT 2: I just noticed in a screenshot in another topic that on Windows the AP performance preference also seems to show that OpenCL must be enabled for hardware acceleration, so it appears to be the Windows counterpart for Metal compute acceleration in the Mac version.

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, R C-R said:

OpenGL

OpenCL. OpenGL is something different.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

OpenCL. OpenGL is something different.

Thanks. Post now corrected.

[Sclong137]

Despite nobody daring to stick out their necks, I can report that this 2GB Asus Geforce GT1030 appears to fully support AP and AD in the hardware acceleration department. Multiple live Gaussian blurs and 30 recolour and pixel layers all render in real time and update immediately on moving around the canvas. Happy bunny.

 

I don't understand why Serif programmers don't monitor these posts, they could learn a lot from their customers. Now, let's get overlays for effects and filter layer masks along with guides that can be seen on blue projects. Thanks Serif, despite a few omissions, your software is fantastic and I tell anyone who'll listen.

[R C-R]

52 minutes ago, Sclong137 said:

I don't understand why Serif programmers don't monitor these posts, they could learn a lot from their customers.

Because there are usually several thousand posts per week, so if the programmers did that, they would not have much time left to work on the programs, the job they were hired to do.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Because there are usually several thousand posts per week, so if the programmers did that, they would not have much time left to work on the programs, the job they were hired to do.

Cannot resist

https://xkcd.com/303/