After installing Snow Leopard on my Macbook I was excited to see if I could use OpenCL.
OpenCL is a technology to use your graphics card to do tasks that are traditionally done by the CPU
The most common example given is encoding videos. A video card, a GPU is substantially faster for some tasks.
For example in the benchmark below it gives an example of a Core 2 Duo (C2D) running at 3gz takes 12 seconds to perform the benchmark vs 0.93 seconds using the GPU!
My Mac being slightly older is slower still.
OpenCL introduces hardware decoding of H264 streams. That is instead of maxing out your CPU when playing a BlueRay disc it now offloads the work to the GPU, making your computer more responsive.
But, you need a Nividia 9600GT, my 8600M GT does not cut it 🙁
……………… OpenCL Bench V 0.25 by mitch ………..
…… C2D 3GHz = 12 sec vs Nvidia 9600GT = 0,93 sec ……
Number of OpenCL devices found: 2
OpenCL Device # 0 = GeForce 8600M GT
Device 0 is an: GPU with max. 940 MHz and 32 units/cores
Now computing – please be patient….
time used: 2.971 seconds
OpenCL Device # 1 = Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz
Device 1 is an: CPU with max. 2500 MHz and 2 units/cores
Now computing – please be patient….
time used: 15.817 seconds
Now checking if results are valid – please be patient….
🙂 Validate test passed – GPU results=CPU results 🙂