#Simple graphic program for mac full#
#Simple graphic program for mac software#

And at a millisecond a pop, rendering all 3,000 pushed the rendering time up to 3 seconds. There was no way to pipeline 3,000 county images. Core Image was waiting for each image to return to ask for the next one. The problem I hit was this: Core Image works great if you have one image to manipulate, but if you have 3,000 images, it’s a disaster. The throughput to the GPU is about a gigabyte per second. To understand when GPU programming is and is not appropriate, there are really only two numbers you need to know:Ī round-trip to the GPU takes about a millisecond. You actually need to understand how graphics cards work before you sit down and try to use their GPU libraries. Well, here’s what Apple doesn’t tell you.

#Simple graphic program for mac software#

What? What about the peephole optimization and real-time image processing? What about me not knowing needing to know the details of GPU programming and my software Just Working? Apple, help!!

#Simple graphic program for mac full#

Drawing 3,000 counties slowed down from 750 milliseconds (with Cocoa Drawing) to about 3 full seconds using Core Image. I rewrote my drawing routines to cache each county image and repaint it on demand using Core Image.

Thank you, team of patronizing technical writers. “Again, you don’t need to concern yourself with the details of the compilation techniques.” Here are some examples, taken from their Core Image Programming Guide, along with my commentary:

OpenGL seemed like a pain to learn, so I decided to check out Apple’s Core Image, which supposedly lets you take advantage of the graphics card without taking time to learn OpenGL.Īpple is absolutely relentless in promoting the virtues of Core Image in their technical documentation. The graphics card should be able to help with graphics programming… right? Phase 2: Core Image With these issues in mind, I heard the siren song of the GPU. From the user’s perspective, the program seemed slow and bloated.Ĭocoa Drawing seemed to allocate a lot of memory buffers for its own mysterious uses. For applications that are remotely scientific, this behavior is completely unacceptable.Įven after I reduced the complexity of the shapes to increase performance, drawing 3,000 counties still took about 750 milliseconds. I.e., county borders sometimes appeared to move for no reason. The shapes sometimes differed based on the fill color. I first wrote the drawing routines with Cocoa ( NSBezierPath and the like). The goal: draw this quickly Phase 1: Cocoa Drawing