Support For OpenGL,OpenCL,64 Bit

Want OpenCL support.
Want 64 Bit.

+1 for OpenCL support! There are a number of other graphic/texturing/rendering applications out there that support OpenCL as a means of speeding up render times, and think that FilterForge is definitely an application that can benefit from this.

And +1 for pointing out that OpenGL is a different thing (and something that FF already supports).

Offhand I'm not sure if the app is 64-bit or not, though judging from the sheer number of crashes I experience when rendering large textures and the relatively puny amounts of RAM in use during a render on a 64GB machine, I'm guessing probably not. This is another huge opportunity to increase performance and stability for users, as well as give filter creators more headroom to develop more exciting and exotic filters.

Hooray for 64-bit support in the 6.0 beta!

And bump with regards to OpenCL support... maybe keep an eye on that for 7.0?

Skybase - it sounds like you may not really understand how OpenCL and GPU-based computing works. As it would apply to a program like Filter Forge, it would be similar to how other rendering programs make use of it. Neither the CPU, GPU, or the program "run faster" - the speed limits are based on clock speeds and numbers of cores, etc. What would happen (assuming the FF team wanted to take on the challenge and make a world-class application) is that may of the parallel computing tasks associated with rendering/ray-tracing could be distributed among the GPU cores. While the GPU tends to run at a much lower clockspeed than a CPU, most GPU's have dozens or even hundreds of cores/stream processors. The net result is typically a DRAMATIC increase in performance. Think of it less as "please make FilterForge run faster" and more as "please make FilterForge make better and more efficient use of existing resources." Your phrasing is shorter, but neither would fit on a t-shirt

For anyone with a decent or better graphics processor in their system, the GPU is generally an under-utilized resource that's often seeing minimal use when tasked with simply rendering the screen in OSX or Windows.

Not every task can benefit fr om tapping into OpenCL, but those that can are ridiculously zippier. For example, look at Adobe. They've leveraged OpenCL with their Mercury Playback Engine that's used in Premiere Pro and After Effects on certain transitions and effects. Not every effect can take advantage of MPE hardware acceleration, but those that do are either rendered in real-time, or require minimal time to render (versus being rendered in software-only, or non-GPU-accelerated mode).

I'm of the opinion that if FF embraced OpenCL, it would be in a manner similar to Adobe's implementation. They'd have certain effects and functionality that were accelerated through OpenCL, and performance increases would vary depending on how and wh ere filter creators used them.