As the title says. Will TurbulenceFD ever be able to use the power of GPUs?
Last mention/question was over a year ago.
Thanks 
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Reactions, the successor to TFD is going to support GPUs on Mac soon.
Much of the work on Reactions was to remove TFD’s dependence on CUDA (which is Nvidia-only and thus unavailable on macOS). This is already complete and the Metal backend (i.e. macOS GPUs) will be usable soon. This includes Apple Silicon M1 and M2 GPUs.
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Really can’t wait! Is soon a month or 6 months?
The next Reactions update will be the Mac/Metal update. Timing is always hard to predict with such core tech updates, since there are several unknowns that need to be worked out. But at this point i’m confident it’s going to be closer to one month than six.
I’m writing this to you on a Mac while GPU tests are running
Awesome. How does performance on the mac compare GPU vs CPU? Can multiple GPUs be used at once?
I don’t have specific benchmarks, yet. Performance will also evolve over the next few updates. In general, fluid sim performance is roughly proportional to the available memory bandwidth. For example, a CPU or GPU with 500 GB/s can be expected to run the sim roughly 10x faster than one with 50 GB/s. There is a big difference between a regular M1 (68GB/s), an AMD Radeon Pro W6900X (512GB/s) or an M1 Ultra (800GB/s).
The Multi-GPU sim prototype won’t make it into Reactions at least for the first release.
Having GPU capability from virtually day one.10 YEARS AGO !! Was a quantum leap and Jascha led the pack…few have caught up with Jawset. It must be incredibly hard to get this to work else the others such as Fume and XP would have done so…to get 2 GPU’s to work in tandem would I imagine be another quantum leap.
The caveat with multi-GPU sim is that it comes with a performance overhead. Unlike for multi-GPU rendering, for simulations the cooperating GPUs have to communicate a lot. As a result, performance first gets worse than on a single GPU before it gets better again for very large sims. The exact break-even point depends on the specific hardware and several simulation parameters.
Considering that memory available to a single GPU continues to increase (M1 Ultra has 128GB), it’s unclear how relevant this tech will remain for graphics apps in the coming years.
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Any Beta available soon for mac?
Depending on how flexible your interpretation of “soon” is, yes
Here is a very WIP screen rec running the M1 Ultra GPU:
Awesome! I guess I’ll try and be patient
Another WIP update running the current nightly build of Reactions with C4D R26 on a Mac Studio. Open tickets to the next update v0.2.9 are counting down…
Are there any updates on this version?
Unstable nightly builds are available already. I would recommend most users to wait for v0.2.9 though.
Thanks, When is 2.9 coming?
My reactions beta says expired. How would i renew that?
The Mac port for v0.2.9 took longer than i projected (like most things, frankly). But at this point only bug fixes are left, so it shouldn’t need too long until i can tag this next update. We’ll be back to a regular update cycle after that.
As usual, you can check out the latest nightly builds if you are interested.
Your Reactions Beta license shouldn’t have expired, that was essentially a bug. It should now be active again.
Cool. I was able to login but as soon as I click any button it immediatly crashes. I guess I’ll keep waiting!
That sounds like you may be running on an Intel Mac. I have tested on M1 only thus far. Intel related bugfixes are coming up…
That’s correct. Intel max pro.
Could you try the latest nightly build (v0.2.8-784 or newer) to see how far you get on the Intel Mac?
Then please send the ~/ReactionsData/reactions.log file.
Thank you.
Note that you can cleanly uninstall a previous version by running the following command in Terminal: /Applications/Reactions.app/Contents/uninstall