The performance enhancements to Mac OS X have me very excited, especially considering the new Mac Pro. I'm most pleased by OpenGL 4. When will you guys get your hands on it, and will there be fullscreen mode ever? It (full screen mode, and mission control), has completely changed how I multitask.

In terms of GL4, yeah, it's about time. Not that Houdini uses GL4 beyond some minor roles (though this will likely change in years to come), but by the time that OSX 10.9 will be released, the GL 4.0 spec will be over 3 1/2 years old. Hopefully it's GL4.2 or 4.3, as well. The GL3.3 extensions GL4 also incorporates will be welcome too. This is all assuming we can work around the fact that Apple's GL4 driver likely still will not have any legacy GL features, which Houdini currently uses extensively.

But I'm still not sure what to think about the new Mac Pro [apple.com]. Will be rather polarizing, I think. At least it's no longer in a half-ton enclosure, but the reliance on external drives and devices has been a bit puzzled. I like the fact that my workstations are completely enclosed, with only a handful of connections. But perhaps I am not the target market

Can Houdini use the OpenCL in 10.9?

I don't believe we have received a 10.9 seed build yet, so I cannot speak to anything other than what Apple announced today. Hopefully the driver is fixed so we can use OpenCL on OSX.

I like the idea of keeping the HDDs separate, it's normally the thing that fails, and also causes heating issues so a machine of this size probably couldn't deal with them as well. I think this direction is ripe with possibility and if not this version surely down the line for me it will be the best workstation. I think it's OpenGL 4.1 right now. The performance enhancements on the CPU/memory side of things are very impressive: http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/advanced-technologies.html [apple.com] . It's good to see the focus back on performance.

Betas are available, have been for about an hour I think.

The timer coalescing is a pretty decent feature (and is something present in Win8). I was a little surprised with the Memory compression feature, given how much of Apple's current product line is based on flash drives (making swapping exceedingly quick anyway), but if running a hard drive as the primary drive it'd give a decent boost. I guess it's a reasonable optimization regardless of the underlying storage, especially given the amount of processing power available today.

Edit: Ah, must not have received the seed notice yet. Apple's mailservers must be on overdrive at the moment

There are apparently lot's more performance enhancements. This version seems to me like the best of both worlds, feature wise Mac OS X has always been the best, now they're going further with performance.

Graphics driver performance enhancements would be very welcome as well, though I don't see that on the list. Hopefully it's implicit. OSX GL performance has lagged behind native AMD and Nvidia drivers' GL performance for quite some time now.

I was just wondering how well Houdini will work with the Fire Pro GPU's in the new Mac Pro as aposed to nVidia cards. I have heard from a few people that nVidia has an edge of the AMD cards?

The hardware looks to be a full 2048-shader AMD GPU (same as the FirePro W9000), though judging by the TFLOP rating, clocked slightly lower than the FirePro W9000 (by ~10% or so). The hardware is definitely solid, the question is how optimized the driver Apple & AMD are working on turns out to be. Since there are two GPUs in the system, I'm curious if the driver will automatically shift around graphics and compute tasks between the GPUs, or if this will be something that needs to be managed at the application level. I'm hoping the former but expecting the latter.

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/ [developer.apple.com] you might be interested in the Painting the Future video, in it they demo MARI on the new Mac Pro. I saw some Houdini work in the reel at the start I think.

twod
The hardware looks to be a full 2048-shader AMD GPU (same as the FirePro W9000), though judging by the TFLOP rating, clocked slightly lower than the FirePro W9000 (by ~10% or so). The hardware is definitely solid, the question is how optimized the driver Apple & AMD are working on turns out to be. Since there are two GPUs in the system, I'm curious if the driver will automatically shift around graphics and compute tasks between the GPUs, or if this will be something that needs to be managed at the application level. I'm hoping the former but expecting the latter.

It would be interesting when you or one of your colleagues get a chance to run Houndini on one of these machine if you could post your thoughts here on the pros and cons of how Houdini runs on it!

Sure! We'll let you know ‘later this year’….whenever that is.

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ [apple.com]

Do SESI use LLVM?

There is a Clang (LLVM) build available for OSX, in addition to gcc, if that's what you are referring to.

Yes, Apple's LLVM 5.0 seems to give some fairly big speed improvements, although you're code probably doesn't rely on compiler optimisations so much.

Also Mavericks comes with OpenCL 1.2, and it works on intel 4000/5000 graphics. I found it funny that the original developers of OpenCL for sometime didn't have the latest version running. Maybe this stuff got pushed aside with iOS but they're picking up the slack again.

As Maverick is going to be released today, can someone tell are there any better OpenGL performances in Houdini?

SreckoM
As Maverick is going to be released today, can someone tell are there any better OpenGL performances in Houdini?

Yes - I've found there is at least one performance improvement on a AMD 7950 card; selecting primitives is quicker than OsX 10.8.5.