Can OpenGL And OpenCL Overhaul Your Photo Editing Experience?
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Page 1:Fast Action Behind Still Photos
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Page 2:Q&A: Under The Hood With AMD
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Page 3:Q&A: Under The Hood With AMD, Cont.
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Page 4:Test Platforms
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Page 5:Applications: GIMP, AfterShot Pro, And Musemage
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Page 6:Applications: Adobe Photoshop CS6
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Page 7:Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe
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Page 8:Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe, Cont.
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Page 9:Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe, Cont.
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Page 10:Benchmark Results: GIMP
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Page 11:Benchmark Results: AfterShot Pro
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Page 12:Benchmark Results: Musemage
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Page 13:Benchmark Results: Photoshop CS6
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Page 14:The Picture Is Changing
Benchmark Results: Musemage
The amateur family photographer in us was most interested to see how Musemage testing would turn out. Inevitably, we find ourselves at the end of the weekend with dozens of images snapped at some family function or a beach trip or birthday party. While every shot is different, many need bounce flashes toned down, saturation improved, sizes scaled down for emailing, or any number of other alterations. Most often, we blow off this sort of editing because it’s simply too time-intensive. But Musemage offers the promise of reducing such jobs to mere seconds—if it works as promised.
First, we turned to the program’s integrated benchmarking module, a clever nod by the designers toward enthusiasts and reviewers like us. The benchmarking tool loads a sample image pre-stocked inside the application and cycles it through roughly 80 effects. The better the overall processing performance, the higher the score. We can see the huge performance gap between the Radeon HD 7970 card and APU. Clearly, the application does an admirable job of leveraging the GPU for scaling, and circumventing the bus-imposed bottlenecks mentioned by Adobe.
We discovered during testing that Musemage, like Photoshop CS6, does nearly all of its GPU-based acceleration via OpenGL. The only feature Musemage currently codes for OpenCL is HDR processing.
With current drivers, Intel’s HD Graphics 3000 is OpenGL 3.0-compatible (although still lacking OpenCL support), which is why our lowly Intel Core i5 notebook is able to beat every configuration here in software-based HDR processing, even AMD’s FX-8150.
Turn OpenCL back on, though, and results practically drop off the left edge of the chart. It’s a bit odd that our FX-based system with the Radeon HD 7970 card is slightly slowly than the A8 running the same card, but with such fast processing times, 60 milliseconds is probably within an acceptable variance range.
And last up, the test we really wanted to see. As expected, performance scales fairly well up the AMD stack, with the FX/Radeon HD 7970 combo taking about half the time to crunch our eight-image batch as the APU-based notebook did. We were a little surprised to see the Intel notebook slip into the middle of the results, even edging past the desktop A8 configuration leveraging its integrated graphics. This tells us that Musemage is likely coding its OpenGL support for the 3.1 or prior generation, rather than the current 4.x, in order to maximize compatibility with Intel’s large installation base. Note that Intel HD Graphics 4000 supports OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL 1.1. Still, when you want top OpenGL performance, it’s clear that discrete graphics is the way to fly.
- Fast Action Behind Still Photos
- Q&A: Under The Hood With AMD
- Q&A: Under The Hood With AMD, Cont.
- Test Platforms
- Applications: GIMP, AfterShot Pro, And Musemage
- Applications: Adobe Photoshop CS6
- Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe
- Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe, Cont.
- Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe, Cont.
- Benchmark Results: GIMP
- Benchmark Results: AfterShot Pro
- Benchmark Results: Musemage
- Benchmark Results: Photoshop CS6
- The Picture Is Changing
With the 7970 meeting or beating much of the far more expensive Quadro line, Nvidia will have to step up. Maybe a GK114 or a cut-down GK110 will be put into use to counter 7900. I've already seen several forum threads talking about the 7970 being incredible in Maya and some other programs, but since I'm not a GPGPU compute expert, I guess I'm not in the best position to consider this topic on a very advanced level. Would anyone care to comment (or correct me if I made a mistake) about this?
That would depend on the CPU.
core i5 + 7970
core i5 hd4000
trinity + 7970
trinity apu
core i7 + 7970
and core i7 hd 4000, and compare against fx8150 (or piledriver) + 7970.
it seemed to me as if the apu bottlenecks the 7970 and the 7970 could work better with an intel i5/i7 cpu on the graphical processing workloads.
http://www.streamcomputing.eu/blog/2011-06-22/opencl-vs-cuda-misconceptions/
CUDA is a dying breed.
2687W: 2P server CPU, 8 core (16 threads), 3.1 GHz (3.8 GHz turbo), and 20 MB of L3 cache.
Cost per CPU: $1885
Quadro, Tesla... These are graphics cards that are also capable of more than gaming, even if like alpha said above, many of them aren't always the very fastest such cards for compute performance anymore and most definitely aren't the fastest compute cards for the money.
I'll have a look and see if I can find benchmarks to compare with those done in this article.
This would allow software vendors to implement their video format of choice everywhere while making it able to play fluently everywhere where it matters!
What semi-modern computer has a CPU so weak that it can't play video? Even a single core Atom CPU can play video without trouble. I'd be more worried about old GPUs (such as older Atom netbook GPUs and other weak GPUs) not always being able to play modern video very well, not CPUs. Heck, even my almost ten year old laptop with an old P4 is GPU limited in video, not CPU limited.
Prior to the HD3k, Intel wasn't able to play videos decently; only blocky and badly rendered pictures of something moving on the screen. Period.
And no, unless the Atoms are on the ION platform, they can't play any video in more than SD format. Let alone apply filters for re-size.
And to directly answer your question. Core2 Duos on laptops were not able to play videos decently and nothing before that was able to, where any iGPU from nVidia or AMD was able to prior to the C2D's in notebooks. I'm pretty sure in desktop was not that much different.
Cheers!
My GMA 950 IGP of my 2GHz Pentium-Dual Core computer (on-board IGP) from 2007 or so would disagree with you. It handles 720p excellently and 1080p well and even my Pentium 4 630 from my 2004 desktop can handle 1080p excellently once I gave it a Radeon 5450. It's CPU is only a 3GHz P4. My old Dell 2.4GHz P4 laptop with an Intel IGP (I'd have to check to make sure which one it is) can't handle 720p very well, but the CPU has not trouble with it, just the GPU. Heck, my Atom netbook (1.6GHz single core from around two years ago, I'd have to check the model to be sure of it's GPU and CPU model number) can play 480p just fine and 720p/1080p also don't tax the CPU much, just the GPU.
My whole point is that weak CPUs have no trouble with video, only weak GPUs have trouble with video. You'd have to find an extremely slow CPU to be unable to watch video on it so long as the rest of the computer, such as the graphics, are good enough. Even low-end GPUs like my GMA 950 can handle video playback decently, so having a GPU should not be much of a problem except with extremely weak systems such as some Intel netbooks or a very old notebook/desktop without a decent video card.
Maybe so, howerver, nVidia is supporting openCL with 301.42 drivers. IMHO, having nVidia cards benchmarked would be of interest to those of us who own nVidia cards.
that's why there are more CUDA apps out there....you are very wrong my friend....CUDA is and will be the better engine
That's why CUDA is being replaced with OpenCl and such more and more, isn't it? Whether or not it is better isn't even what bgaimur said, only that OpenCL and such are taking over CUDA's market. The industry can't have only one company's graphics cards compatible with their software, especially with how AMD offers the Radeon 7950 and 7970, consumer cards that rivals and even exceeds most Quadro cards, at much lower prices than Nvidia has been asking for their Quadros. Heck, 7900 can probably beat some even more expensive Tesla cards.
Many of the modern CUDA apps are moving towards OpenCL, even if not restricted to OpenCL, to at least being capable of being completely run on OpenCL. Besides, do you have proof for your claims about CUDA's superiority? CUDA's main advantage, as I recall, was that it was easier to use than largely undocumented or poorly documented OpenCL. That's been improving (among other improvements) and so has the incentive to use a language that is compatible with more than just Nvidia GPUs.
Easier said than done. It would require extensive campaigning to let the general public know, and they're still going to be very skeptical of participating in the cloud program.
I second that, especially when the 4000 is OpenCL compliant, and that you did encounter CPU bottlenecks in this reviews' benchmarks.
Thanks