Indigo Renderer Forum

I ve recently come acoss a short, interesting and somewhat disturbing article in a computer magazin that I've read and subscribed to for over 20 years, c't Magazin fuer Computertechnik.

I cannot copy the German text here for obvous reasons, but I can provide my own English translation:

3D Professionals complain about Apple

In an open letter to Tim Cook 3D-Developer Paolo Ciccone has criticised the quality of the graphics drivers in OS-X and gained the applause of prominent 3D-Pros. Ciccone operates his own 3D-Software company and also helps with development on the open source software LuxRender. He complains that defective Open-CL drivers abort rendering of scenes on OS-X, which work without problems on other Systems.
The problem is said to be so bad that Jens Verwiebe, the main developer for the OS-X platform has given up.
Ciccone asks other Apple users to contact Tim Cook as well.

This is the second article in c't that mentiones substandard quality of Apple's graphics drivers, the other article complaining about the lacking 32 bit color support. However, the article above clearly indicates a problem that could have direct impact on Indigo's perfomance for it's Apple users.

IIRC some early demos of Indigo 4.0 were created on Mac Pro. My question is whether Glare has experineced the same problems as the LuxRender developers ?

Here is a link to a thread] on Blendernation:
http://www.blendernation.com/2015/05/04 ... -tim-cook/

Another issue is that Apple recently just upgraded to support OpenCL 1.2 that launched November 15, 2011!
Same as Nvidia where this took ages too...

It can take years until OpenCL 2.0 or even the recent 2.1 version is supported by this companies...

By that I suggest that Indigo v4 will maybe support OpenCL 1.2, but no higher version.

(btw: all this doesn't tell anything about the actual quality of the drivers at all, just about the lack of keeping up with general OpenCL developement!)

The AMD OpenCL drivers are pretty terrible. Have spend a majority of the day trying to work around miscompiles.

El Capitan appears to bring some improvements to GPU computing in Mac OS X. DOn't know about the drivers, though.