Egregoros

@petrillic All of my Windows boxen are VMs and my one mac is a Mini with 16GB of RAM that probably can't even open a file this big much less edit it.

The other thing is, it needs to not assume it can fit the entire image into VRAM. Like, this particular image and workstation combo would probably work (it's ~800mpix, 5 layers, so ~4 Gpix, at RGBA32 that's 16GB and my new GPU has 32GB of VRAM) but anything much bigger would not.

So intelligently managing transfers between CPU and GPU to do the transformations will be part of the requirements for such a tool to avoid getting horribly bottlenecked on PCIe bandwidth

RIP Steve Jobs, for all his failings, at least he fathomed that GPUs were not Apple's strong point and deferred to NVIDIA and others for such things while he was alive. ;(

Tim Crook, failed to get the memo that GPUs mostly win via brute force and massive parallelization; and Apple's "GPUs" do not cut the mustard, even slightly. e.g. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/llK3Dy

An old luggable I had with a GTX1080 with 8GB of VRAM, could churn through that at 4K 120Hz without the fans spinning up any harder.

Meanwhile, an M5 Pro? Can't even do full screen, 60FPS. ;( You might get slightly higher frame rates windowed, but only if you know how to turn off Safari's screen refresh locked to 60FPS in the Developer Mode settings.

smdh

I read somewhere that there's some company that is facilitating use of GPUs on Apple Silicon Macs more recently, but annoyingly: just for A"I" workloads, which is: kind of not what I want my GPU to be doing, ever.

CC: @petrillic@hachyderm.io