Apple Metal rather than OpenCL?

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yakman2020
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Apple Metal rather than OpenCL?

Post by yakman2020 »

I've looked at the code. It looks like one could port from OpenCL to Metal without major craziness, but I'd like the developers views on the question. Would such a port be interesting?

MacOS allows OpenCL, but iOS makes OpenCL a private framework, making it unavailable any program with hopes of being on the AppStore. I don't know if anyone has information to the contrary, but it appears that it will stay that way. On the other hand, the Metal framework seems to have a very reasonable GPU compute framework which would presumably be compatible with OpenGLES, as all the diagrams seem to indicate that Metal is a part of the OpenGLES implementation.

So I would rewrite the Bullet3OpenCL directory and instead call a version of the same library, presumably with the same external function names. Does that seem like a sound approach?

Thank you in advance for your advice.
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Erwin Coumans
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Re: Apple Metal rather than OpenCL?

Post by Erwin Coumans »

It will be a very large project. The Bullet OpenCL rigid body pipeline requires a fast discrete desktop GPU for performance. I've seen no benefits in using a laptop or mobile GPU, due to lack of GPU compute power and lack of GPPU memory bandwidth compared to fast discrete desktop GPU.
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