Martin
0
WWDC 2018: Deprecation of OpenCL
Apple announced that they will deprecate the OpenCL framework with macOS 10.14 (Mojave). That actually didn't came too surprisingly to me since I expected that move since many years. That expectation was one of the reasons why I was so persistently against a OpenCL renderer in Cheetah3D. The other reason was the lack of Macs with fast GPUs.
Falcon actually started as a OpenCL raytracer many many years ago in early 2013. But it became very fast obvious that Apple had no real interest in fixing bugs in their OpenCL implementation. So I halted the development.
When Apple released the new MacPro 2013 and reassured their commitment to OpenCL I was more than happy and bought a new MacPro straight after the keynote. But I was disappointed once again and OpenCL was still as buggy as before. While OpenCL worked fine for trivial tasks like image filters, color grading and such stuff it got pretty useless once things got more complicated and once the OpenCL kernels got more complex.
When I contacted Apple about all my OpenCL problems they made it very clear to me that I shouldn't expect too much help from them (a pretty friendly formulation). At that time it became pretty clear to me that Apple already had lost it's interest in OpenCL again.
So I decided to turn Falcon into a CPU based renderer (middle of 2014). And looking backward I'm actually quite happy that I made that decision.
But there is one thing that makes me a little bit sad about OpenCL. OpenCL has one of the most elegant and easy to use APIs I've ever seen. It's a true joy to work with it. The lack of OpenCL accelerated apps was never the fault of the API itself or of the developers. It was Apples lacklustre support for OpenCL. Even although they finally fixed some critical bugs over the last 2 years which made OpenCL more usable. At the end it was too little too late.
So R.I.P. OpenCL. You deserved a better treatment.:frown:
P.S. I've attached one of the last images I rendered using my OpenCL renderer. I still had hope that I could use that code one day.
Apple announced that they will deprecate the OpenCL framework with macOS 10.14 (Mojave). That actually didn't came too surprisingly to me since I expected that move since many years. That expectation was one of the reasons why I was so persistently against a OpenCL renderer in Cheetah3D. The other reason was the lack of Macs with fast GPUs.
Falcon actually started as a OpenCL raytracer many many years ago in early 2013. But it became very fast obvious that Apple had no real interest in fixing bugs in their OpenCL implementation. So I halted the development.
When Apple released the new MacPro 2013 and reassured their commitment to OpenCL I was more than happy and bought a new MacPro straight after the keynote. But I was disappointed once again and OpenCL was still as buggy as before. While OpenCL worked fine for trivial tasks like image filters, color grading and such stuff it got pretty useless once things got more complicated and once the OpenCL kernels got more complex.
When I contacted Apple about all my OpenCL problems they made it very clear to me that I shouldn't expect too much help from them (a pretty friendly formulation). At that time it became pretty clear to me that Apple already had lost it's interest in OpenCL again.
So I decided to turn Falcon into a CPU based renderer (middle of 2014). And looking backward I'm actually quite happy that I made that decision.
But there is one thing that makes me a little bit sad about OpenCL. OpenCL has one of the most elegant and easy to use APIs I've ever seen. It's a true joy to work with it. The lack of OpenCL accelerated apps was never the fault of the API itself or of the developers. It was Apples lacklustre support for OpenCL. Even although they finally fixed some critical bugs over the last 2 years which made OpenCL more usable. At the end it was too little too late.
So R.I.P. OpenCL. You deserved a better treatment.:frown:
P.S. I've attached one of the last images I rendered using my OpenCL renderer. I still had hope that I could use that code one day.
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