§ 14 - About Speed

I wrote dTank (β) so that it would use the CPU, and only the CPU, to process images. This has two immediate consequences:

1. Changing your graphics card will have zero effect upon processing speed
2. The more powerful your CPU is, and the more bandwidth your main memory has, the faster dTank (β) will run

I did this for a couple of reasons.

First, Apple changes the operating system too often and too radically for me to have much faith in the stability of their GPU acceleration layer(s.) They are constantly deprecating and otherwise mangling important OS X APIs, so I try to keep use of same to an absolute minimum — I have better things to do than refactor my code just because someone at Apple is feeling frisky.

Second, GPUs, at least so far, have fairly serious memory limitations, and that in turn would put limits on the size of the images you process.

Does this mean that dTank (β) is / will be slower than other applications that do the same kind of things? Well, yes, it can mean exactly that. On the other hand, you don't have to pay for dTank (β), and you can always choose to work on your images using some other application. In fact, if dTank (β) isn't fast enough for you, I encourage you to do so.

Having said all that, I do try to make dTank (β) as fast as I can considering these constraints. It is possible that I will implement further speed improvements as I have time to work on them.

 

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