Fractal Architect 2.0 is available on the Mac App Store as of January 23, 2012.

The theme of this release is: A Taste of Fractal Animation. Its not the full animation solution the product line is evolving toward, but there is a lot to play with now.

A secondary theme is: No More Flam3. The author of the Flam3 renderer requested that it be removed from the product. So its no longer bundled with Fractal Architect.

Fractal Architect can still interface to the Flam3 renderer, but you the user, will have to provide your own Flam3 copy for Fractal Architect. As Flam3 is GPL licensed, you have the complete freedom to do just that.  But of course, this is totally optional, as Fractal Architect provides its own renderer(s).

Another secondary theme is: OpenCL based CPU & GPU Acceleration. For Macs with recent ATI & Nvidia GPUs, the Fractal Architect renderer can run on the GPU and a good deal faster than on the CPU. A Flam4CUDA  renderer has always been part of Fractal Architect, but it was Nvidia only, so ATI users could not use it.

So with Fractal Architect, you can choose between 4 different renderers:

• OpenCL CPU (Flam4 compatible) – for all Intel Macs
• OpenCL GPU (Flam4 compatible) – for Intel Macs with recent discrete GPUs – both ATI & Nvidia – (Intel IvyBridge mid 2012 or so)
• Flam4 CUDA (Nvidia GPUs only)
• Flam3 CPU – if you provide your own renderer copy

In the future, Fractal Architect plans to support the Flam5 OpenCL renderer with support for true 3D, custom variations, and pure Xaos based topology.

(Note: Flam5 has been previously called Flam4OpenCL on PCs. The OpenCL renderer provided now with Fractal Architect is derived from the earlier Flam4CUDA which matches the Flam3 feature set.)