Thread: Kanati's New Toy

Originally Posted by Kanati

heh. At least it's getting a little traffic.

Couldn't take it any more.

Originally Posted by Kanati

Procreate has come quite a ways in the last year and a half too. It's really close to being a photoshop contender. You are only limited by the ram (in the case of the 12.9" that's 4GB I believe) for layers. So that's a bit of a shortcoming because if you are working with a really large canvas you don't get a lot of layers to work with.

One really nice thing that it does is record everything you do. So then you can export it to a video file, edit it in another app and and upload to youtube if you are so inclined.

With Thunderbolt (and the software infrastructure), external GPU is viable for MacOS. I wonder if it's a future possibility with iPad/iOS ? Though not as quick as being on the same data bus as the RAM, you could use the VRAM for more storage (or, I suppose, off-load graphics processing - which is the whole point in the MacOS space).

Have you used Pixelmator?


Æ

Originally Posted by Kanati

Actually it's not the vram that's the issue, it's the system ram. And more specifically the inability for the software to access an actual file system. With photoshop, it uses a scratch disk for all those layers. But with the ipad it has to hold everything in memory. Since I'm not an IOS developer I don't know if it's possible to have this sort of "scratch disk" capability or not. If they can do that then procreate will definitely get on a par with photoshop in the future. IOS 11 I believe has something closer to a real file system, but we're 4-5 months out before that is released.

iOS 11 will have a 'real' file browser - rough equiv to the Finder in MacOS, or Windows Explorer (or whatever they call it now).

The new file system is already here: APFS came to iOS with the 10.3 update (which is why applying that update took so long - it converted the entire file system on the device).

You can get APFS in the current MacOS (Sierra), but support is 'experimental'. It will be the default for the next MacOS.

I understand that it's not a VRAM issue. But one of the cool things about GPUs for a decade now is that you don't have to use them for rendering. They're optimized for different sorts of jobs than your CPU (like vector math) so various parties have built an infrastructure that lets you do that sort of math over on the GPU. It's like having a co-processor or an FPU back in the day. But the bus and external interface (thunderbolt is only one) are now so good that you can have an external graphics card.

I realize I'm not telling you anything you don't know - I was just speculating that if we're off-loading processing to the graphics card, couldn't we also take advantage of the RAM that was there?

I'm also not an iOS developer, but I can't imagine there isn't some facility to stash something into the flash storage à la /scratch or RAM-disk or swap - it's just that the performance would suck. If you could use an external GPU in iOS, you'd at least be able to have an additional 8 Gig of layers. Switching to a swapped-out layer wouldn't be as fast, but it would be possible.

I mean - always mount a scratch monkey... right?


Æ