Apple Mac OS X OpenCL Performance vs. Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Mac OS X OpenCL Performance vs. Linux

Yesterday we looked at the performance of Apple's "Snow Leopard Graphics Update" for Mac OS X 10.6.4 designed to enhance both the image quality and rendering performance for OpenGL games and applications. For testing their graphics update we benchmarked Mac OS X 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, and 10.6.4 with the Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 installed and benchmarked the Apple OpenGL performance against Ubuntu Linux. The results were mixed showing Apple still has room to optimize their OpenGL stack compared to NVIDIA's Linux implementation and in not all areas did this package update result in performance enhancements. After we finished that OpenGL comparison, we decided to see how the OpenCL performance compares between Mac OS X 10.6.4 and Ubuntu Linux 10.04.1 LTS. We tested the Open Computing Language on both the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and on the NVIDIA GPU.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15227

[Nille]

The Stream SDK 2.2 Support OpenCL 1.1 and not only 1.0 -.-

[Veerappan]

I find it interesting that you haven't been able to get Stream installed without the Catalyst driver installed.

I have Stream SDK 2.?1? installed on my desktop at home right now, and I'm using the open source r600 Mesa driver (Radeon HD 4770, xorg-edgers ppa, Ubuntu 10.04, Catalyst has never been installed). Obviously, I've only been able to use CPU-based OpenCL, but it runs.

You do have to provide the OpenCL demo applications included in the SDK with a command-line switch to explicitly disable GPU execution (or maybe it's explicitly enable CPU), otherwise the demos crash.

[Nille]

You do have to provide the OpenCL demo applications included in the SDK with a command-line switch to explicitly disable GPU execution (or maybe it's explicitly enable CPU), otherwise the demos crash.

you need to start the demo with --device cpu

[curaga]

On page 2:

which isn't surprising as although this is a relatively GPU,

Did you mean "relatively fast CPU"?

[leidola]

I find it interesting that you haven't been able to get Stream installed without the Catalyst driver installed.

Yes, it works fine, even on AMD machines with NVidia GPU. But I don't know
if AMD's stream-sdk works on Intel CPUs. - technically it should work fine, but I never tried it.

[leidola]

By the way, Michael, you can download debian packages of the stream-sdk from http://forums.amd.com/forum/messagev...hreadid=125792.

[brent]

ATI's Stream SDK is trivial to use for CPU OpenCL acceleration. Just copy the .icd file to /etc/OpenCL/vendors and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that ATI's OpenCL library can be found. That's it.

[tball]

Yes, it works fine, even on AMD machines with NVidia GPU. But I don't know
if AMD's stream-sdk works on Intel CPUs. - technically it should work fine, but I never tried it.

It works fine with Intel cpu's.
In generally I think stream SDK is very easy to setup. Install it anywhere you like in your home directory, and then just setup a few environment variables in your ~/.bashrc and you are good to go.