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Can you add the new Radeon Pro Vega II

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2019 3:55 am
by Kevincav
I'm not sure how to look up hex IDs on osx though. It's for the new mac pro.

Re: Can you add the new Radeon Pro Vega II

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2019 4:17 am
by bruce
I don't know how to look it up on OS-X either, but knowing it is not going to help. FAH only supports folding on the CPU on OS-X.

Re: Can you add the new Radeon Pro Vega II

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2019 4:30 am
by Kevincav
Ah ok, that's a shame. I can probably bootcamp / have it installed there. Any reason behind that?

Re: Can you add the new Radeon Pro Vega II

Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2019 6:28 am
by bruce
Probably several reasons, but I'm not sure I know all of them.

At the time that FAH was being developed, the then-versions of OS-X provided poor support for OpenCL. Certain essential calls didn't work or didn't work correctly and Apple didn't provide timely fixes. Development worked with AMD & NV and were able to create useful code to support both Linux and Windows. The efforts to support the Mac ended up going nowhere. Also, it was a lot easier to find Development staff that had experience with Windows and LInux and (at least at Stanford) finding experienced developers with a background in OS-X was a challenge.

The PowerPC was a power hog and wasn't really well designed for ~100% compute loads. That was discardede when they switched to x86 but it was pretty straighforward to cross-compile the Linux CPU code for the Mac -- but the iGPU platform took too many development resources and produced few results, compared to the discrete GPUs that were common in gaming PCs.