posted June 14th, 2008
Current versions of Naked light use the GPU to render incredibly fast. This has its problems:
Graphics chips, their drivers, and Mac OS X’s OpenGL implementation simply aren’t really all that stable. This has caused even virtually identical sets of hardware to fail in different, spectacularly bad ways.
Not all GPUs support the advanced feature set Naked light needs. The algorithms that work really well on the GPU work, well, less well on the CPU. So much less well, in fact, that on some models Naked light is so slow you want to rip your hair out. Sorry, Mac mini users.
Hard limitations on graphics cards simply impose a silicon ceiling on the quality of certain filters (namely those from the Blur family).
Some time ago, probably as I was starting Beta 2, it became clear that there needed to be a preview-quality GPU renderer and a high-quality CPU renderer. The GPU renderer is there, albeit still rather buggy. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working the other half.
The CPU renderer brings in higher render quality (again, largely to blur and sharpen filters, but images on the CPU use Lanczos resampling instead of linear interpolation), better performance on unsupported computers, and a nice safety net from various bugs that arise on different platforms. Moving forward, it’ll provide some speedups where (a) I can cache images for reuse and, in some cases, (b) I can render simultaneously on both the CPU and the GPU, increasing both speed and quality.
As a quick test, I’m putting up a partial build of this right now before I get deep in polishing things off. Most features—most notably all tools and all Core Image-based filters—don’t work (and may crash/beachball). All of the Adjustments (save Curves) and all of the Focus filters (save Bloom and Gloom) do work, with a few bugs.
This is a barely functional release (less so than usual!), so I’m not putting it up for auto update. But with luck it should work on a far greater number of Macs than previous releases have. As usual, if it doesn’t work, leave a comment or an email at brandon@naked.la!
