Are AMD/ATI GPUs supported under Mac OS X?

[sidewalk]

Is it true that GPU acceleration isn't supported for Macs with AMD/ATI cards? If not, any idea when this will be implemented?

Thanks,
sidewalk

[Headroom]

No, that is not true.

Indigo supports Open CL as well as CUDA and ATI graphics cards are supported through OpenCL.
My experience on my machine is, however, that it's not much help for the stuff I do. Mostly interiors and I love caustics. Currently only Path Tracing is supported and that not the preferred render mode for such things.

Also the graphics cards on iMacs employ ATI's notebook graphics chips and those are not the most performant graphics cards when compared with the desktop versions.

If you've got a Mac Pro YMMV

[sidewalk]

The reason I ask is this:

I'm having trouble rendering with GPU acceleration. When the option is activated (from either the Skindigo or Indigo interface), the render seems to freeze just before the first image update occurs. No errors, just no activity. If the option is not activated, the scene renders just fine. See the attached screen shots of both scenarios.

Is my GPU compatible?

Here are my system's specs:
Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Mac Pro 3.33 GHz 6-Core 2010)
ATI Radeon HD 5770
Indigo 3.0.14
Skindigo 3.0.15
SketchUp 8.0.4810

I'm happy to provide more detailed info if it'd help troubleshoot. Thanks in advance for the help!

sidewalk

[Headroom]

I'd post this in the Bug reports section of the forum.

GPU support is still a relatively new feature and there are not that many Mac users.

[FakeShamus]

Ok, so maybe it's just the radeon hd cards giving indigo trouble? I have very similar specs to your Mac pro, but with the hd 5870, and I get the same problem. I've brought it up before, but no solution as far as I know. I've tested lux render's OpenGL gpu mode and it works fine with my card, so there has to be a way to get it running. Any Glare people want to chime in with news on this?

[sidewalk]

Doesn't Headroom's iMac have a Radeon HD 5750?
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/i ... specs.html

[FakeShamus]

Yeah, guess so - are there different drivers for these different models, then? Is it only the Mac Pro cards not working somehow?

[Voytech]

I'm on a Mac Pro (2x 3GHz Xeon - 2008) with the nVidia GeForce 8800 GT and both openCL and CUDA render fine, although I usually have to start the render in openCL, stop it and then switch to CUDA to make that work. Otherwise it gives a initialization error. I would try with ATI but mine fried itself a few months back

[ENSLAVER]

Check the render log.

[sidewalk]

Here's what I get before it freezes. Not sure what I should be looking for. Any help? Thanks!

Executing '/Users/.../default.igs'
Indigo Renderer v3.0.14, OS X 64-bit build.
Licence verified, licence type: Indigo Full Lifetime, licensed to '...'
Detecting available GPU(s)...
Device number: 0
Name: ATI Radeon HD 5770
Memory: 512 MB
Type: OpenCL
Device number: 1
Name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3680 @ 3.33GHz
Memory: 7680 MB
Type: OpenCL

Scene file path: '/Users/.../default.igs'
Sky zenith luminance: 3387.095215 cdm^-2
Rendering with GPU acceleration
Forcing bidirectional=false, hybrid=false, batched=true
Light luminous flux (geometry name=EnvSphereGeometry): 6.481E+09 lm
Building Object Tree...
1 objects.
calcing root AABB.
AABB: (0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000), (1.765300, 1.706563, 1.657350)
max tree depth: 2
reserving N nodes: 1(8 B)
total nodes used: 1 (8 B)
total leafgeom size: 1 (8 B)
Finished building tree.
AutoFocus: setting camera focus distance to 6.89847 m.
Num buffer layers: 1
Master buffer size: 33.555 MB
Settings:
Image width: 1106 px
Image height: 650 px
Internal image width: 2228 px
Internal image height: 1316 px
Verbose: false
Image save period: 60.00000 s
Splat filter: FastBox
Downsize filter: mn_cubic, blur=1.00000, ring=0.00000, support=3.20000px
Render region: false
Supersample factor: 2
Metropolis: false
Bidirectional: false
Hybrid: false
Aperture diffraction: false
Post-process diffraction: true
Auto setting number of threads to 12.
Finished initialisation (Time Taken: 0.03248 s)
Time to render thread start: 0.03267 s.
Starting threads... (num threads: 12)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=2)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=1)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=3)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=4)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=5)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=7)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=8)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=6)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=9)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=10)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=11)
Starting render thread. (RNG seed=12)
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.
Render thread terminating.