Linked by HAL2001 on Thu 24th Feb 2011 23:38 UTC
Thread beginning with comment 463922
To view parent comment, click here.
Member since:

While we have to thank Apple for the OpenCL standard, the bulk of OpenCL projects is taking place in Unix and Windows environments.

Graphics card manufactures cannot release directly drivers for MacOS X, so they are not updated as much as for the other systems.

Most research work is done in Unix and Windows, and while MacOS X is Unix at its core, it is cheaper to buy new graphics cards for your existing computers as to replace them by Macs.

As for GDC, it was more of a PR thing at least for those developers that have been doing multithreading/multiprocessing for years. So I am currently not aware of any project that really took it into production code.

Reply Parent Score: 2

kaiwai Member since:

Even if nVidia and ATI could release drivers directly for Mac OS X the reality is that OpenGL is implemented by Apple as to ensure the same sort of consistency as one observes with DirectX. The reason why DirectX took off was because developers no longer wnated to deal with vendor specific buggy OpenGL implementations - where hours are wasted debugging code that works wonderfully on one vendors OpenGL implementation but not another. Then add another layer of nVidia ceasing the support of older hardware so you've possible got older OpenGL implementations floating around that you've got to test against as well.

Compare that mess to Mac OS X where there is a single implementation that works across the board - sure, it doesn't have insane optimisations like what a hardware vendor offers but from a programmers perspective it is one less thing to be concerned about in the larger grand scheme of things. Rather than debugging for different OpenGL implementations more time can be spent enhancing what they're working on.

Reply Parent Score: 2

moondevil Member since:

You don't hang around do you?

Reply Parent Score: 2

_txf_ Member since:

AFAIK most of the openGL functionality in OSX (that is drivers and libs) are provided by the vendors to Apple,which then chooses what goes in and how; this is also partially why apples openGL is slower (they don't pick all the optimizations. So in effect it really is the same thing. Either way there is very little/no difference in the way openGL is used by application programmers (that is the point of OGL) just how well the manufacturers implement ogl functionality.

Edited 2011-02-26 17:25 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

stofke Member since:
2011-02-27 makes use of GDC

Multithreading Goodness: MacHg was written from the ground up using Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology. This means MacHg can make use of all the cores of the processors in your machine in an efficient way. Importantly, this also means that the UI of MacHg will be fast and responsive.

Reply Parent Score: 1