Mon
Oct
17
2005

dcraw for Mac OS X Universal and processor-specific optimized builds; automatic build and site update system

The Mac OS X dcraw package now contains several executables in addition to the “standard” (which is already optimized, though not cpu-specific) one:

  • /usr/bin/dcrawG4 is optimized specifically for the PPC7450 (G4). I’ve seen a 20% speed improvement while testing (PowerBook G4 1.5GHz) with 10D files, maximum quality mode (-q 3).
  • /usr/bin/dcrawG5 is optimized specifically for the G5 (PPC970) processor (won’t run on other systems). I’ve seen a 25% speed improvement on single processor systems (iMac G5 1.8GHz) and 35% for dual (Dual 1.8GHz) over the standard version (-q 3) was used also). I’d love to hear from different G5 users about the measured speed improvements (see CLI command that follows).
  • /usr/bin/dcrawU: This is a fat binary, i.e. an universal build, that will run both on PPC (standard optimization) and x86 (SSE3 optimization) Macs. If you have a system to test it, please do so and report results… you can try with my reference RAW file issuing a command like:

time dcrawU -w -q 3 -b 1 -m -n -3 CRW_0925.CRW

I’ve setup an automatic build system for dcraw, it checks for new dcraw versions every 3 hours, building and updating the downloads available here if a newer version is available. It’s already running for the Windows and Mac OS X builds.

Posted by Francisco J Montilla, Oct 17, 12:52 pm
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