So, I did a fairly non-scientific comparison of a very simple action: resizing the window, and monitored the CPU and memory usage while I was at it. I didn’t get very far, and haven’t done much since, but I did just recently get the Demosaic operation to work correctly (Read more about that here, I based what I did on this article). So, over the Christmas break I started working on an OpenGL-based, GPU-first photo editor (I’m calling it Monet). Also, it has much better driver support than OpenCL, especially on linux, thanks to Valve’s work on SteamOS. What I’m wondering is, why OpenCL? Open GL has a shader pipeline that is pretty much purpose built for processing 2D images, and for the slightly more complex tasks (like generating the histogram) it has had compute shaders since v4.3. In fact, even on my laptop, which has a Broadwell (ie 5th generation intel Core) series CPU in it, Darktable didn’t want to work with OpenCL. In fairness to Darktable, they do support OpenCL in some circumstances, but if it doesn’t work on the GPUs I have (2x Radeon R9 290x), which are now fairly old and have reasonably good driver support, you have to question whether it is worth it. RawTherapee doesn’t seem to do it at all, and Darktable’s is flaky. On Linux the use of the GPU in the most popular photo suites is spotty at best. Lightroom and Photoshop have some GPU acceleration, but apparently Lightroom doesn’t really benefit unless you have a big display (I guess they do all their rendering on a smaller view of the picture). Apparently using the GPU to do all the heavy lifting isn’t something that the popular photography applications do. Seems a bit passé right? Well apparently not.
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