More news from AMD: OpenCL support in OS X ‘El Capitan’
This is an amazing week – not only did AMD help break up Cycles into smaller kernels, but now they’ve taken a big step towards proper support on OS X too!
Ton Roosendaal writes:
After having struggled with limited OpenCL support for years, the OS X driver team at AMD made a big step forward by supporting function calls in the OpenCL compiler now. This is in the Beta 3 release of El Capitan.
That means that Blender now can support the current Cycles render engine for Mac Pro (10.11) with similar GPU render quality as Cycles had for CUDA in the past years.
Note: the “split kernel” version of Cycles stays in development, this would be the preferred way to have Cycles work in the long term. That work isn’t finished yet though. For as now, a “mega kernel” would (and is on OSX 10.11 now) outperforming the “split kernel” in both quality and speed.
Nice. But what about OpenCL support in Linux / MESA on AMD 6xxx / 7xxx cards?
thought so – Apple would not release a MacPro and mention openCL and then not doing anything.
AMD and Apple obviously are working on the driver aspect together.
Now of Apple would make openGL more open ;)
Great news. I will try this asap.
Oh my god thank you! Great news indeed!
And Apple gets to keep me as a customer.
Ton,
I have bought a hugely expensive NVIDIA K5000 Quadro for Mac OSX but I painfully found out that the GPU actually renders slower on my Mac than CPU. Would El Capitan solve that issue as well? Or only if I additionally buy an AMD card?
Today I tried the GPU (2x ATI FirePro D700 6144MB) Cycle render under OS X El Capitan 10.11. Beta.
I was excited, no ERROR kernel,…… but no victory.
You can judge for yourself.
http://anul147.deviantart.com/art/Blender-3D-GPU-Cycle-render-OS-X-558893937
THX to ATI and Blender Team, i see the future, good future.