On Mar 14, 2006, at 5:37 AM, Sylwester Pietrzyk wrote:
Quartz 3D in Tiger uses the GPU for almost all graphics (For example,
Quicktime 7 plays back on an OpenGL surface), and Aperture
actually uses
the GPU for a lot of the basic image editing calculations,
For what? What 3D operations does aperture do to 2D pictures?
Please don't
tell me that GPU is used for image editing, because it is not true.
Yes,
there were specialised graphic cards for Mac that had dedicated CPUs
accelerating many photoshop filters, but it was back in early
nineties and
won't probably happen again. GPUs used in today's cards are used
solely for
3D operations acceleration and won't accelarate image editing
calculations.
We, err, Apple started integrating Quartz rendering with GPU
processing power about 2002-2003.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/
Previous similar efforts from Apple during the early 1990s are mostly
irrelevant to this work as the teams responsible for them are
completely different.
Remember that I worked at Apple all through this development period,
from 1991 to 2004.
If lightroom can run just happy on much lower spec Mac with Quartz
enabled
graphic card I can't see any reason why Aperture couldn't. For me
it is
rather Apple's politics to convince pro photographers to buy a new
Mac.
Aperture and Lightroom represent completely different software design
and implementation philosophies. Apple does have a stake in
encouraging new system sales, but the engineering team working on
Aperture really isn't a part of that. Their design and implementation
is dependent upon much higher spec hardware requirements, and they
want even higher, where Adobe is addressing the very large base of
existing customers and users with more traditional ideas. Aperture is
looking to push the edge, where Lightroom is looking to fit into the
recent and current hardware envelope.
Godfrey
