Octane V3 - OpenCl vs CUDA performance difference. Tweet

[taylorcoxmotion]

Here's one thing I've been wondering, as someone who is currently on the Mac side of things...

Apple's OpenCL and OpenGL support has been lacking as of late. Other software makers have been lamenting this lack of support for a while now.

With the introduction of the Metal API in OS X El Capitan, it looks like OpenCL and OpenGL on the Mac are a dead end. Don't get me wrong, Metal looks awesome, and I've heard a lot of great things from developers that have had some hands-on time with it. But Metal requires a complete rewrite, and Mac-specific code, instead of something that works cross-platform.

At this point, I'm really curious about whether Octane 3 OpenCL is even going to work on a Mac. I know you guys have been playing things close to the chest, as you're still early in development. But whenever you could give a progress report, there are scores of trashcan MP owners that are dying for an update. Not trying to be pushy .

I'm anticipating building a Windows machine in the future, but it's not in the budget near-term. Unless developers quickly and ubiquitously support Metal (Adobe and The Foundry seem to be on board to an unknown extent), then the Mac's ability to sustain a 3D workflow continues to be in doubt. Which is a real shame.

[Goldorak]

Here's one thing I've been wondering, as someone who is currently on the Mac side of things...

Apple's OpenCL and OpenGL support has been lacking as of late. Other software makers have been lamenting this lack of support for a while now.

With the introduction of the Metal API in OS X El Capitan, it looks like OpenCL and OpenGL on the Mac are a dead end. Don't get me wrong, Metal looks awesome, and I've heard a lot of great things from developers that have had some hands-on time with it. But Metal requires a complete rewrite, and Mac-specific code, instead of something that works cross-platform.

At this point, I'm really curious about whether Octane 3 OpenCL is even going to work on a Mac. I know you guys have been playing things close to the chest, as you're still early in development. But whenever you could give a progress report, there are scores of trashcan MP owners that are dying for an update. Not trying to be pushy .

I'm anticipating building a Windows machine in the future, but it's not in the budget near-term. Unless developers quickly and ubiquitously support Metal (Adobe and The Foundry seem to be on board to an unknown extent), then the Mac's ability to sustain a 3D workflow continues to be in doubt. Which is a real shame.

We see similar performance between comparable AMD and NVIDIA GPUs with Brigade 3 (this is with OCL 1.2 on PC BTW). No guarantees on how this will translate to Octane 3 on a specific platform, it's still too early to say, just sharing data points from previous testing we've done with OCL path tracing.