3. OpenCL Vs Software ? On Win 10

OpenCL Vs Software ? On Win 10

  • S

    It seems that I am a bit undereducated 😉

    I hope someone can explain to me the difference between
    "Software" and "CL (OpenCL)" in the Preferences > Performance panel.

    Why or when it might be better/meaningful to select one or the other.

    My specs are:
    Win 10
    CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, 6-core.
    GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070.

    Thanks a lot in advance.

    0 1 Reply
  • administrators

    @Subpath The Compute Engine option controls how image effects, gradient meshes, etc are rendered.
    If you have NVIDIA GPU, the following options should be available (with explanation):

    • Software: all image effects, gradients, noise etc are computed using all the CPU cores. In your case 6 cores, with hyperthreading could be 12 threads (this can be changed in preferences).
    • OpenCL: image effects, gradients etc are computed using the GPU, with OpenCL compute. This should be available for most Windows machines with a GPU, but how well it works depends on the OpenCL driver.
    • NVIDIA: this should be available if NVIDIA CUDA drivers are installed. With NVIDIA GPU this is the best choice, in this case image effects, gradients etc, are computed using CUDA compute.
    1
    S
     1 Reply
  • S

    @vectoradmin ,

    Thank you for your, as always, clear and well described
    explanation of how "CL" and "software" works.

    0