Rendering on the new Mac Pro

Update:

The render performance using the Mac Pro’s twin GPUs at the same time varied between roughly 20x and  28x faster than using its very good 6 core Intel Xeon CPU.

When restricted to using a single GPU as the render device, the render performance varied between roughly 11x and  16x faster than using its CPU.

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To GPU or not GPU Render – That is the Question

Flam4CUDA for Mac and Fractal Architect have supported fractal rendering on the GPU since 2009. Flam4CUDA for Mac (I am its author) was an open source precursor to Fractal Architect.

Fractal Architect 3D, FA 2, and Serendipity all use the powerful OpenCL platform to render on either a CPU or a GPU. On OS X Mavericks, all recent Mac GPUs from Nvidia, ATI, and Intel are supported.

The beauty of  rendering on the GPU is quite simple:   Speed !!    (speed varies by GPU model)

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Hotfix Updates for Fractal Architect & Serendipity

Mavericks 10.9.1 has a change that breaks the cached OpenCL rendering code for users using the Intel Iris Graphics GPUs. This change does not affect Nvidia or ATI discrete GPUs. Intel CPU based rendering is unaffected.

News Update (Jan 15, 2014): All 3 apps have been updated for this issue.

All 3 apps have had an update sent to Apple which fixes the problem. Apple’s Christmas shutdown for all App reviewers will delay the mandatory review by Apple. So you may not see the free update on the Mac App Store until the New Year or so.

Workarounds until the Update is Released 

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Fractal Architect 3D – It’s Here Now

The Biggy – 2D & 3D Fractals

  • 2D, 3D, and mixed 2D/3D fractals.
  • No limits on the number of variations types that can be handled – 330 variation types and growing
  • Expandable variation type library – compatible with both CPU and GPU rendering.
  • Full Xaos support.

Huge  Library – 330 Variation Types

330 variation types are included (more to follow).

  • 82 3D variation types
  • 284 2D variation types
  • 15 direct color variation types

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