Does anyone know "Native Canvas"?

[Jqqerry]

As i know about native canvas,

which is

rendered using OS-native APIs, i.e. Metal on Mac, DirectX on Windows.

Disabling it means reverting to the old OpenGL APIs.

And I know the goal of that is because Apple and Microsoft no longer support OpenGL.

What I'm curious about is that there may be a bug in the process of converting and migrating code like this.

However, even if delays occur or become slower, we suggest disabling native canvas in the current Adobe.

So is there any benefit of using native api? I wonder if code conversion is forced because it is no longer supported, or if there is an advantage of speed or error compared to OpenGL.

[D Fosse]

Someone from engineering should answer this, but the advantages of "native canvas" (Metal / DirectX) are simply that they are developed and supported going forward, while OpenGL isn't. The old OpenGL functions still work, but it's probably just a matter of time before they don't. The official word is that OpenGL is "not supported" in MacOS, "deprecated" in Windows.

I found an old post by Mark Dahm (Adobe staff) that sums it up like this:

"The transition to a 'native canvas' is a long process, and as we discover compatibility issues, we'll keep that other option aroud. We are seeing newer cards also fall out of GPU mode and this option might be helpful for a bit, so keep it handy and let us know for which issues it works. Our goal will be to remove it once the native canvas is working well across all customer systems."

I think he explained in even greater detail somewhere else, but I can't find it at the moment.

[Jqqerry]

Thanks for very kind reply.

What's clear is that thry're making a difference for a reason, and we're always grateful for Adobe's work.

The reason why I posted was that I could understand what most of the technology previews test. But I didn't know anything about coding, and when I saw a lot of delays reported at the turn of the year, I wondered if I could use all the speed completely when this was done, or if the native api itself was a bit slower or heavier than openGL. Anyway, thank you for your answer!

[PECourtejoie]

Also, the benefits might be shown better going forward with newer GPUs, I think users of M1 processors experience a very speedy Photoshop, that feels as fast with 8GB of RAM as older systems with 16GB. And the Apple architecture is made for Metal performance. What I wonder is if nVidia and AMD are pushing a lot behind DirectX, they both have their own technologies, Vulkan and CUDA...

[Jqqerry]

Thank you for your interesting answer @PECourtejoie 
Adobe is not obligated to explain these changes, but if you let me know how much changes each API can feel, I will be more excited to wait for future changes... 😃

[PECourtejoie]

A timer and some stats application giving you the fps of screen rendering and some runs with the functions you run might be the best indicator. Adobe, like many in these industry relied on cross platform technologies, then saw the rug being pulled under its feet. It is not about performance, it's about being able to support functions going forward. Photoshop saw so many rewrites though the years, even on the PC side with 64 bits, I think it's engineers know how to handle change. But the code base of a 30+ years old program is so intertwined, Photoshop has so many functions, UI & UX parameters (scrubby sliders, shortcuts that change how a tool button behaves, different framework s for some technologies that it's impossible to transition from one technology to another without some hiccups, hence the prefs to fall back, test and troubleshoot...

[D Fosse]

users of M1 processors experience a very speedy Photoshop, that feels as fast with 8GB of RAM as older systems with 16GB.

By @PECourtejoie

Yes, it might be fast, but actually I think you should consider more RAM with M1 than you would with a discrete video card. "Unified memory" just means that the system and the GPU share a common memory pool. With today's memory-intensive GPU processing, not the least in Photoshop, that means the GPU can easily eat up 8 or 10 GB from that common pool, leaving Photoshop with only half of the nominal spec.

So while I'd say 16 GB should be considered practical minimum for Photoshop today, with an M1 you might want to bump that up to 32.

[PECourtejoie]

@D Fosse I should have stated that this is not first hand experience, but Benchmarks that Ps Power user Colin Smith had shared on his Youtube review of the first M1 laptops: (I believe it was in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SndWxRaMzxA ) And keeping in mind that the native version was not yet out, IIRC!