Fractal Architect is testament to the power of OpenCL powered GPU rendering.
The 2013 Mac Pro OpenCL drivers are world-class and deliver amazing performance. The 2011 and 2012 Macbook Pros are solid GPU rendering workhorses.
The Intel CPU OpenCL driver was greatly improved in Yosemite with a doubling of performance over Mavericks.
It is also serves as a stark reminder of what happens when the OpenCL driver/compiler/runtime provided by Mac OS X is not maintained and bugs are ignored. The Intel OpenCL GPU drivers on the Mac OS X platform are best described as: unusable, broken.
We have no control over the state of these drivers. Apple can do amazing things with their drivers, as the Mac Pro team did. They can also give you a miserable experience, when bug reports are ignored and years go by without useable drivers.
Unfortunately, for most of you having Macs that are powered by Intel GPUs, you will not have the chance of using GPU rendering.
These are the Mac models currently having OpenCL driver issues and a short comment on why they don’t work:
- All Intel Iris, HD 5×00, HD 4000 GPUs
OpenCL LLVM compiler targeting those GPU’s can’t compile our kernels.
- 2014 Macbook Pro with Nvidia 750M GPU
Automatic GPU switching breaks OpenCL apps. Other Macbook Pro models also use automatic GPU switching, but they work fine.
- 2010 and earlier Macbook Pros
GPU rendering worked fine on Mountain Lion. Mavericks and Yosemite drivers are broken/useless.
Apple – you have shown what you can do. Please give attention to your OpenCL driver stack.