PS CS5 10-bit video under Open GL on Mac OS??

[petemyers]

Dear Adobe:

I have been working with the engineers at Eizo for the past year in trying to get the Eizo CG 243w monitor to work at 10-bits per color plane via mini displayport to displayport connection while using the 4870 graphics card on a Mac Pro.

Eizo re-wrote the firmware for the CG 243w to be compatible with the mini displayport standard released by Apple. As of this past summer, the CG 243w now interconnects with the 4870 graphics card to the monitor, while hosted on a Mac Pro under 10.6.

BUT in using Adobe's on test image, it is obvious that the display is still not working at 10-bits per color plane, as banding is showing.

Would you please clearly state whether Adobe Photoshop CS5 in the current version is capable of driving the 4870 graphics card and displaying 10-bits per color plane images using the MacPro and current OS? We need to know where the bottleneck is coming from---Adobe, Apple, AMD.

It is frustrating that Windows users have successfully been able to use Photoshop CS5 with a handful of different graphics cards and a large number of Eizo 10-bit monitors for a long time and it still appears that Mac users, known for being graphic intensive, cannot. We really need help getting to the bottom of this. Adobe Labs might be cranking out some fun new product, but functionality of a key issue for Photoshop would seem to be higher priority---and 10-bits per color plane seems like it would be one such issue.

cheers,

Pete

[petemyers]

But Chris, we are the customers caught in the middle, not the pons to resovle it. Some one in senior management at Adobe can certainly make a call to TIm Cook and get this resolved.

Pete

[Chris Cox]

You could try to talk to Adobe management and convince them it's a priority.

But frankly, we have bigger issues we need Apple to solve.

You might get farther if you convince Apple that it should be a priority (or that they should be embarrassed for letting Windows take the lead).

[MarkDS]

Chris,

This gets very complicated with Apple. There are two issues here: (1) the OS

doesn't accommodate 10-bit; (2) even if it did, only DisplayPort can convey the

data, not DVI. So there are AT LEAST these two necessary conditions. Even when

they satisfy (1), there is still (2) which they will not necessarily have dealt

with because the display providers are involved and Apple shields itself

magnificently from 3rd party exposure. Because Apple insists on supplying AMD

video cards with mini-DisplayPort instead of standard DisplayPort, one needs to

use converters or converter cables. Neither NEC not Apple will take

responsibility if one tries any of these hardware connections and they destroy

equipment, because they are all 3rd-party. This is seriously interfering with my

ability to work with NEC to solve this issue. I'm up for trying whatever,

provided I don't have to pay for the consequences of screw-ups which these guys

should have collaborated on avoiding from the get-go. But they don't collaborate

and none of their warranties save consumers harmless of the consequences from

trying stuff which they themselves suggest without having properly tested what

they are suggesting. Go figure. It is a circular mess.

Cheers,

Mark

[ihbond]

Yea...patiently awaiting as well....

DOES ANYONE KNOW..if you can run the windows on mac and use the 10bit gpu as a temp solution?

[Chris Cox]

DOES ANYONE KNOW..if you can run the windows on mac and use the 10bit gpu as a temp solution?

Yes, you can - if you have a video card that supports the 10 bit output option and the right drivers.

[djdaveastro09]

So what this means is that if I go purchase a mac and run windows on it with bootcamp then I can successfully drive my 30 bit monitor? I've been using PCs forever and now that I've finally decided to switch to the dark side I found out about this business...

[Chris Cox]

djdaveastro09 - that is correct. Apple still has not released drivers that support 10bit/channel framebuffers for MacOS.

[warzenbeisser]

Has there been any progress in this matter yet? Does OS X 10.7 "Lion" address this issue in its initial release (which should be out any day now as the golden master is said to be available to developers already)?

[petemyers]

That is a real good question---whether 10.7 addresses the 10-bit issue. I contacted Tim Cook at Apple and briefed him on the problem, but never received a reply---though it appears he received my note. There just does not seem to be any interest in solving this problem. Extremely disappointing, but we are in the new age of customer be damned I am afraid.

Pete

[videonow.info]

I have become so disgusted with Apple I can't express myself. I have been following this thread for months and it's the same old noise from the Steve Jobs money farm.

I just bought Premier Pro and the whole production bundle when I saw what FCP X was all about... a joke.  Apple is now a consumer electronics company and has dumped it's pro users in a burlap bag by the side of the road.  I have been using Adobe products for years and have never been disappointed.  The last Apple laptop I bought last Spring will likely be my last.  To really harness the best features of Premier Pro and 10 bit video card for photography editing it means back to a PC... that's fine (the constant updates are annoying!)  Onward!

[petemyers]

I do wish that senior management at Adobe would confront Tim Cook on the subject, but I think they are unwilling. It is going to take public shame to move Apple to 10-bits. Adobe seems more interested in their conflict with FLASH then the issues with Photoshop. And while we are on the subject of Adobe, how is it that we still dont have EVERY function in Photoshop in 16 bits, 32 bits fixes or FP? The progress is glacial. I remember how it took to Version 7 just to get to 16 bits! That is not much better then Apple on the 10-bit video card issue. Notice how all the art filters are still 8 bits?

It surprises me how few photographers seem to care about the 10-bit video card issue. There is not much of a cry from the photo world for 10-bits, and I would assume that this is just a blind spot---but it is troubling. Seeing is believing, but no one semes to bother to even check it out.

In the 1990's when Apple was down to the nubs, it was photography and graphic arts that produced the revenue to pull the company out of the celler. Our reward for all that? iPad and iPhones, not computers or software that supports advanced imaging. They seem unable to focus on more then one thing at at time, and what is in, is in, and what is out, is out.

Very sad Steve, Tim and Apple! It shows personal immaturity.

Pete Myers

[videonow.info]

I would hold out hope that Lion will add 10 bit, but at the cost of the user interface I prefer.  In addition to that I have spent years getting my Epson 3800 to print the way I want.. and need to repeat prints that are currently being printed.  I also use QuadTone RIP and not sure if that will work under LION.  No Rosetta with Lion either.  Forget it, I have frozen my system at 10.6.8. 

Pete has it right...

[Chris Cox]

how is it that we still dont have EVERY function in Photoshop in 16 bits, 32 bits fixes or FP?

Because they take time (that could be spent on new features), and because users haven't identified much that they still need in 16 bit or 32 bit/channel.

They keep asking for everything instead of telling us what they actually need - so they get nothing.

[petemyers]

Well Chris, anytime Adobe would like me to bring in an allstar team of consultants in advanced image processing to get the issues straight in PS, just let me know.

I have been using PS since Version 2 and the forward movement on key image processing features has always been glacial. PS is THE bedrock product for Adobe, so why is it that senior management is so out of touch on the 10-bit issue that they are not breaking down the door at Apple demanding a solution? Sorry, but I bet that not one email or phone call has been made by senior management at Adobe on this issue to Apple. Like Apple, Adobe keeps trying to make more and more product lines, instead of making sure that the one's that are key to the company actually work. For example, the 32-bit functions in PS is a total mess in CS5. The 32-bit tools are unusable for image processing, and that is a shame. Even a 32 bit fixed point solution woudl be better then having a 32 bit FP solution that does not work.

Pete Myers

[Chris Cox]

The 10 bit issue is really, really minor compared to all the other problems with MacOS.

We've asked Apple for it, and they haven't delivered it.

10 bit/channel display is ready in Photoshop, whenever the OS adds the code.

And it's been available on Windows.  (plus Windows would run faster on your MacPro, thanks to kernel bugs in MacOS)

The 32-bit tools are unusable for image processing, and that is a shame. Even a 32 bit fixed point solution woudl be better then having a 32 bit FP solution that does not work.

Again, you need to give specifics.

Because as far as everyone else can tell - the 32 bit/channel features work just fine, and are quite actively used by many people.

[MarkDS]

Chris,

I'm using PS on Mac OSX 10.6.8, and I haven't seen any performance drags that I

would consider remarkable. Mind-you, I do have 24 GB RAM and 24 virtual cores to

throw at it, so maybe that's why, but grateful if you could elaborate on what

these "kernel bugs" are and how they impede performance.

Cheers,

Mark

[Chris Cox]

The kernel (or kernal) is the lowest level part of the OS.  It's the part that supervises all other parts of the OS, and handles the lowest level of resource management, threads, etc.

The biggest MacOS kernel bugs that I know of are in thread scheduling:  Windows can make use of the 24 virtual cores without slowing down. MacOS can only make use of 12 of the cores before slowing down, so MacOS doesn't get the benefits of hyperthreading, and runs slower than Windows on hyperthreaded systems.  The sad part is that the Apple kernel engineers don't even understand the problem.

Then there's the locks on trivial memory functions that slow down threaded code, overall poor thread scheduling (not involving hyperthreading), excessive cache flushing slowing down all threads, etc.

You see all of this as reduced performance.  We have to track down each part to explain why some things run faster or slower on each OS when using the same hardware.

[MarkDS]

Thanks Chris. Looks like a big turnaround between the two systems, because not

many years ago I think the informed technical view was that Max OSX handled

multiple cores and hyperthreading much better than Windows (XP then).

Mark

[Chris Cox]

Yeah, Microsoft made a big effort.  While OS X gets relatively slower with each increase in core count.

[Tai_Lao]

Chris Cox wrote:

…OS X gets relatively slower with each increase in core count.

Gulp!    May I pick your brain in this regard, revered guru?

Would going from running Photoshop 11.0.2 under OS X 10.4.11 on a 1.25 GHz PowerPC MDD Dual G4 maxed out at 2 GB of RAM to running the same application under the same OS on a 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5 Quad with 16GB of RAM still give me the substantial increase in performance I was hoping for?  It was my understanding that the late October 2005 2.5 GHz G5 Quad was/is the fastest PPC machine ever made by Apple, and I might be making just that move in the next two weeks or so.

Thanks in advance.

____________

Wo Tai Lao Le

我太老了

[Chris Cox]

Yes, the G5 will be faster.

It's more the 8/16 and 12/24 core Intel systems that really show the slowdowns.

(and can run Windows for comparison)

[Tai_Lao]

Most excellent!  Thank you.

[warzenbeisser]

The thread is drifting off-topic, but since I did not find a more suitable forum, I can't resist the temptation to dig deeper into matters of multi-thread and multi-core speedup. As I learned in what little computer science I studied, concurrent computing is where we should expect the most performance gains in the future (apart from quantum computers, if and when such machines become available) now that CPU clock speeds and transistor miniaturisation are fast approaching the physical limits of today's technology. So parallel/concurrent programming really is a key issue (Adobe might want to observe, or even participate in, research on the open-source Barrelfish operating system by ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research: http://www.barrelfish.org/).

While I still run Photoshop CS5 on a first generation Mac Pro with just two dual-core processors, I have not yet run across too much evidence of Photoshop heavily using multiple cores. When running an action on a batch of separate files, for instance, what I see in Activity Monitor suggests that the files are processed strictly sequentially, not concurrently on as many cores as are available. Is this correct? If so, then why is such a basic opportunity for an instant and massive speedup wasted? Pixel Bender shows a promising framework for flexibly using hardware resources including the GPU to boost performance. By contrast, Photoshop itself seems to rely much less on such techniques. I assume load balancing, memory management and I/O bottlenecks are far from trivial to solve, but wouldn't this be much more significant and useful than cramming applications with ever more (sometimes questionable) features/gimmicks and thus promoting Wirth's Law? It says “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law.

Along with the paradigm change from sequential to concurrent, there is probably a need for companies that presently act rather independently to focus on much more intertwined systems that require a globally orchestrated approach in order to make any quantum leaps possible. Unfortunately, this is often diametrically opposed to predominant tactics in today's economy where market shares and monopolies seem to count more that the actual quality of and progress in the products that are developed and marketed. This is not to say anything against Adobe or other firms but for making efforts to go a step or two further and apply more long-term thinking. It is the vision and strategy that counts most in the long run.

[adinatha]

Along with the paradigm change from sequential to concurrent, there is probably a need for companies that presently act rather independently to focus on much more intertwined systems that require a globally orchestrated approach in order to make any quantum leaps possible. Unfortunately, this is often diametrically opposed to predominant tactics in today's economy where market shares and monopolies seem to count more that the actual quality of and progress in the products that are developed and marketed.

I cannot agree more

To stick (somewhat) to the original topic, 10 bit video output seem to fall into the same category as SSD trim support, mouse curve acceleration adjustment possibility, smooth mouse movement, hw video acceleration framework, Bluray etc. They are important for professionals and enthusiasts but not remunerative for Apple - so they are not interested. I wonder why OS X is the "world's most advanced desktop operating system"? It is sleek and cool, true. It is easy to use, fine. But it was not meant for professionals and this is more clear with every new release. Very sad though. I wish Apple could integrate some of Microsoft's or the open source community's high technologies into OS X

Pete, if you want advanced (scientific) image processing I suggest you use Matlab in concert with shader programming. 10bit frame buffer programming examples are availabe in the Nvidia technote. Don't wait for Apple or Adobe.

[Chris Cox]

You're not waiting for Adobe -- the capability is already built into Photoshop, just waiting on drivers from Apple.