update

Apple just released 10.6.3 this morning, and I’ve noticed a few improvements using aperture 3:

  1. Scrolling anything (finder windows, the aperture inspector and thumbnail browser, the viewer while zoomed in) Seems noticeably faster.
  2. The skin smoothing brush is refreshing faster than I remember (especially while zoomed to 100%).
  3. “Slider Response time” seems to be better – this could be due to both openCL and openGL improvements. From a quick test – I noticed openCL performance has improved according to thesmalluxGPU benchmarking tool.
  4. I’ll update this list as I find more, and please add to it via the comments

Drawbacks:

  1. The update seems to reset the monitor’s color profile. For users who’ve calibrated their displays, make sure to go back and set the correct color profile in the system preferences
  2. Some users on the forums with radeon x1600 video cards have reported issues with visual corruption in the aperture viewer.

The only thing I hope for someday is faster export speed. I haven’t tested this yet.

Note to users and engineers: I’d really like to see a “Export in foreground / Quick Export” option that uses the GPU and prevents me from doing any operations while the export happens. Think about it – if you step through your images one by one and it takes 3-5 seconds to render them in the viewer, the export should be able to utilize the GPU in that same routine to export a version. Usually I don’t mind exporting in the background while I continue to work, but this would be really nice for those “time sensitive” situations…

Another possibility someday with openCL is that a 2nd GPU could be used in the machine to handle exporting while the primary GPU is reserved for image adjustments while working. This is actually technically possible right now with the openCL spec and all dual GPU macbook pros…

Have you noticed improvements?

If you’ve noticed any improvements, I’d love to hear what’s working better for you – post in the comments below and I’ll add to the list. After fixing a few broken libraries after upgrading, I’ve had a feeling that some library cache/thumbnails issues might need fixes outside of the aperture application itself – I’m curious if this theory is correct!