I followed the chapter 16 tutorial up to the point where fireworks should show on the Live View. I’m using a Mid 2014 MBP with the Intel Iris 1536 MB chip which I acknowledge it’s not the best GPU ever, but so far it has been doing mostly great. However, to my surprise, it seems to complete collapse with the fireworks example. When I run the playground with the default count for emitters and particles, the Mac will freeze. I tried to reduce the values to 100 particles (instead of 10000) and 1 emitter (instead of 8), and not only it still freezes, but the entire screen becomes black, as if the GPU had stopped working at all and the screen wasn’t getting a signal. I copied the code to a newer Mac with a discrete GPU just to make sure I didn’t mess something up, and it ran fine.
Even knowing it’s not a discrete GPU, I’m sure this thing can handle 100 particles at a time, so… what might be going on here? Maybe too many threads? I’m very new to GPU programming, so I would like to have a hint about what the problem might be before I crash my Mac again.
hi Miguel. sorry to hear about the Intel GPU issues. while it’s a great overall GPU for system tasks, it is not well suited for compute-intensive tasks such as particle systems. in retrospect, I am also having regrets for not having written this part in a regular Xcode project instead of a playground. a pertinent advice I can give you is to restart Xcode every time a playground crashes because sometimes that is the only way to make it work again.
I suspect this is not the GPU fault after all. I have the fire/snow example running with both fire and snow emitters at the same time at a beautiful 60fps (looks so cosy, especially here in Canada!). I’m probably hitting some bad bug related to the Xcode playground/live view (it completely freezes the OS, not just Xcode). I’ll try the fireworks again running on a standalone app when I have some time, it will probably work fine.
I think it’s a combination of both… but I cannot say for sure. I am glad you are able to sit by the fire though let us know if there is anything else you need assistance with.
let us know if there is anything else you need assistance with.