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Hi guys, designers and affinity developers

 

Let's talk here about new technology introduced Apple in new Mac Os El Capitan to improve speed programs working with GPU directly.

 

Designers, what you think about this technology?

For me, i like idea, but officially Mac that support this technology must be not earlier 2012, so i wish there will be some hack to activate it on older mac.

 

Affinity developers what you think about this technology do you start to work on it, is it really improves speed? Can you say some nearly dates when you release it?

 

Thank you.

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  • Staff

Affinity will support Metal in the very near future - but it will also support OpenGL for those running on older systems or just not upgraded to El Capitan. I can't really see a downside with the technology - it allows us to write more efficient code and make better use of the system for those who can support it, and we are free to revert to our current (far from slow!) solution for users who can't support it. Win, win! :)

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While we are on the subject, will the Affinity apps be able to make use of the second GPU in the Mac Pro? So far, I have been unable to find out if the second GPU can do computations like filters or if it just speeds up visual updating.

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  • Staff

I implemented a Metal-accelerated view - and it was *marginally* (and I mean marginally) better than the OpenGL solution we currently have... The only thing it would help with is pan/zoom performance which is not something we currently have any issues with, so I moved on to fixing bugs. In the future I'll try Metal again and see if any improvements have been made. Don't forget that OpenGL makes use of Metal so when Apple added Metal support they also accelerated OpenGL too as a side-effect, so most of the speed bump we may have seen was already there for free...

 

Metal makes a lot of sense for other tasks but only if you can hand work off to the graphics card to process data in kernels without ever wanting to get it back again - because Intel's memory architecture doesn't allow for this to be toll-free. As a result it takes longer on Intel chips to do the work at high speed on the GPU then ask for it back to use it as part of some other operation than it takes to just do the work on the CPU, so with an Intel chip it isn't a feasible technology at the moment. However, if we're talking about ARM chips, then Metal is a godsend because there is no penalty for accessing the memory available to both GPU and CPU freely.

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So what you're saying is that it´s boosting the iPad (iPhone) rather than the Macs, right?

As you´ve said somewhere else, the iPad pro is thus sometimes even aster than a Mac (When you´re using your Designer development Version)

 

I sometimes feel that my AMD R9 M395X is a bit underused by Affinity (which you´ve already improved on, I know) so I´m curious where performance can take us. (especially looking forward to 10bit display compatibility)

 

Zooming on Wacom Intros Pro (latest drivers) is actually a pain in the a** for me, works perfectly fine with the Apple trackpad though.

 

 

Bottomline is: We can stop bothering about METAL and hope for other (performance) improvements. Thanks for your informations!

 

 

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I have a mac pro 2013 and I'm wondering if metal would give the support for both graphic cards to boost the performance. Pixelmator use both and with some tasks it is much faster. Would it be possible with Affinity too?

Thanks for making awesome apps. When lightroom killer is ready then I can cancel my CC :)

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