We are happy to announce that the pre-release version using Metal is ready for testing.

The focus here has been to get it to compile and run and generate correct results just like the OpenCL version, so please let me know if you experience any issues with the switch.

Regarding performance, generally it should run the same as before as minimal work on performance has been done, but I’ve noticed that the DAG generation phase seems to be running quicker on M1 and AMD systems than its OpenCL counterpart.

The release is also now available as a universal app, while I could get the the DAG generation and search passes running on my 8GB AMD MacBook Pro, currently it now complains of an Apple driver issue for the search phase. Shouldn’t be too difficult to mitigate, but I’ll have to leave that out for the next version to avoid feature creep.

There has also been work put in to make the app more stable, so hopefully this release will be more stable, but again this is pre-release software so please let me know of any bugs you experience.

Next, we’ll be working on performance and getting the Metal API version to run on Macs with AMD graphics cards.

Thanks for everyone’s hard work and support.