Sylwester Pietrzyk wrote:
Adam Maas wrote on 14.03.06 16:04:
Everything in the Tiger UI is rendered on a 3D surface if Quartz 3D is
enabled.
I know that, but it has nothing to do with hardware requirements as Quartz
3D runs happily on 32MB GPU equipped card (of course within sensible screen
resolution).
Until you stress it, Quicktime 7 certainly isn't happy with 32MB VRAM. I
run a system with a 32MB Radeon 9200 card (Most common 32MB GPU on macs)
at 1280x960, Quartz 3D is marginal on it compared to faster GPU's.
Aperture offloads calculations onto the GPU as well, using the
Core Image framework and Image Units(Which is an accelleration
architecture designed to take full advantage of the processing power
sitting unused in the GPU). Core Image essentially uses the floating
point speed of the GPU to massively accellerate 2D calculations. The
other advantage is that Core Image can do parallel processing of said
calculations, using the SIMD units on the CPU (Altivec and SSE2 on PPC
and Intel respectively) as well as the GPU.
Here's a good overview:
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/coreimage.html
Right. But my question is - is it only for display, or for actual image data
stored in main computer memory too?
Actual image data is processed on the GPU, via Image Units. This can be
concurrent to the display, as Core Image is capable of doing these
manipulations in realtime on a fast enough system.
Because Lightroom doesn't use Image Units, Aperture does. Making
Lightroom far less dependant on GPU performance. Lightroom performs much
better on low-end hardware, while Aperture really shows off what the
high-end hardware can do, because unlike Lightroom, Aperture can take
full advantage of the increase in GPU power.
So it will be interesting then to compare speed of both applications when
lightroom would be in final version. I would really laugh if finally
lightroom would come faster in most operations than Aperture ;-)
I'd expect Lightroom to be faster on lower-end hardware and Aperture to
be faster on higher-end hardware. I doubt Lightroom could be faster on
the top-end hardware as Aperture has access to a second processor that
Lightroom doesn't.
-Adam
