Version 5.7.0 update is being reviewed by Apple and has the following major change.
In prior versions of FA 5 and FA X, Intel GPU rendering did not support the comprehensive Mega2D and Mega3D variation sets.
Now using Metal, GPU rendering with Intel GPUs can use both the Mega2D and Mega3D variation sets. Unfortunately OpenCL does not support them, this is a Metal only feature.
AMD and Apple Silicon GPUs never had this limitation. Intel CPUs did not have this limitation either.
Version 5.7.0 update is being reviewed by Apple and has the following major change.
The app no longer allows you to purchase a subscription to unlock the GPU rendering and Animation Sequencer features.
Previously purchased active subscriptions are still recognized and honored. Prior subscriptions will not automatically renew.
There are now 2 optional in-app purchase items (which never expire) :
1) GPU Rendering
2) Video Animation Sequencer
If you had previously purchased a FA 5 subscription and the subscribed periods’ total duration was greater or equal to 1 year (12 months), then the FA 5 app will unlock both the GPU Rendering and Video Animation Sequencer features.
Subscription periods, for which you had received a refund from Apple, will not be included in the duration count.
FA X still offers the Silver and Gold subscriptions to access premium features. FA X does not offer a Loyalty Reward for long term subscribers.
The free FA X base app has limited features and imposes a maximum image size limit of 1024 x 768 pixel area.
FA X + Silver subscription is functionally equivalent to the Fractal Architect 5 app.
Fractal Architect X + Gold subscription is functionally equivalent to Fractal Architect 5 + GPU and Sequencer in-app purchases.
If you want to avoid a subscription, consider purchasing Fractal Architect 5.
Holy Cow Batman! Are we in an alternate reality?
Big Sur is the first MacOS release to finally fix the Metal render accuracy problem that plagued earlier MacOS releases.
iOS 14 led the way. FA on iOS has also received the same benefit.
Now every image in Fractal Architect’s builtin test suite of fractals render exactly the same on:
Now you can use Metal multi GPU rendering on Mac Pros with confidence.
With GPU rendering, Fractal Architect performs better on Apple Silicon than the 16″ Intel MacBook Pro. Nuff said!
This is a huge update adding 2 more render engines to Fractal Architect.
XPC Render Engine Service – Included with GPU subscription
Wide Variation Set Support for CPU and some GPUs
Mega2D / Mega 3D standard variation sets
What is an eGPU (External GPU Enclosure) ?
It lets you use powerful Desktop graphic cards for rendering. (Note: GPU rendering requires a subscription.)
See link for more info. There are specific Hardware requirements.
Fractal Architect X and Fractal Architect 5 are being released for Mac OS together. (They are also called FA X and FA 5.)
Fractal Architect X is a free app that provides a feature set and workflow similar to the Apophysis PC app. Similar to Apophysis, it renders on the CPU and imposes no image size limits.
It also adds about 20 extra powerful features above and beyond Apophysis.
See: Apophysis, FA X, and FA 5 Feature Comparison
The free FA X app will always be able to render on the CPU any static image fractal produced by any product in the Fractal Architect family. You can edit those fractals using its Transform editor too.
The free base configuration of FA X lacks most of the powerful tools found in prior FA app versions FA 4 and earlier. It also has no video animation capability.
FA continues to provide the best flame fractal creation tools available on any platform.
The inexpensive Silver Subscription provides access to:
It does not support GPU rendering.
This provides, same features as Silver Subscription plus:
Fractal Architect 5 is a non-free app that is comparable to FA X + Silver. It is intended for customers that want access to the powerful tool suit provided by earlier versions of Fractal Architect without a subscription.
FA 5 does not provide Early Access to FA 6 features.
It also does not support GPU rendering.
Having an annual FA X Silver subscription for 2 years costs the same as purchasing FA 5.
FA 6 is planned to be released 2 years after FA 5 is released. FA X will have early access to FA 6 features long before FA 6 is released.
This optional subscription provides these features:
See for yourself. Take advantage of the free subscription trial period to test drive all of these exciting features.
There is a one-time initial Free Trial period:
Its time for new versions of Fractal Architect: Fractal Architect X (and its peer: Fractal Architect 5). Two years in development. The new creative possibilities are amazing. This is a huge new version with many new powerful and easy to use features. It has the best workflows of any competing app.
Some of these new FA features are credited to prior Jwildfire innovations. (FA has a long term goal of being fully Jwildfire compatible — not there yet).
All new features are GPU rendering compatible (but if Apple’s OpenCL or Metal drivers are broken, you may not be able to use GPU rendering on your Mac).
Lennart Ostman’s FA 5 Fractal Collection
Lennart has been so excited by these new features and how easy it is to use them. A simple listing does not do them justice.
Here is the grand summary. (More on each feature in other blog posts.)
Let us count the ways:
Best demonstrated with an example video, this workflow is so effective for creative new exciting fractals.
From the Variants editor, create variants using Lua scripts. Select a variant thumbnail, then open the Super Variants editor from the selected thumbnail. Use the Super Variants editor to find even more fractals related to your selected thumbnail.
From that new batch of thumbnails, select one and open a new Variants window. Select a different variant Lua script …. repeat ad nauseam.
Finally, stop with a thumbnail you like. Then create a new fractal from it and finish editing it in the Transform editor (the traditional Apophysis workflow).
So many of these new composite fractal features are easiest to use with the new Lua scripts found in FA 5. You will see!
In practice, these features make a huge improvement in the Variants workflow.
Finally! Blazing fast.
Got a new Lua script to add crackle variation to existing fractals too.
Add hypertile variation to any existing 2D fractal. Automates the steps and randomizes the hypertile parameters.
Incredibly easy and so effective in practice.
Pseudo3D is so legacy. True3D is the state-of-the-art replacement.
If you create a fractal with a 3D variation set, it is automatically a true 3D fractal. Every transform in it is now a 3D transform.
If you open a Pseudo3D fractal created in FA 4 or Apophysis, it is converted to a True3D fractal. (No change in appearance.)
Recent versions of Jwildfire, use a technique I call Pseudo3D-Three-Times to render a 3D fractal. It uses 3 separate 2D transforms.
FA 5 does not. It uses 1 3D transform instead of 3 separate 2D transforms. This is the natural way to do 3D. The rendering cost for 1 3D transform is also 33% less than rendering with 3 separate 2D transforms.
Like Jwildfire, in FA 5 you can edit 3 different triangles, one face at a time. There are 3 faces, called the XY, YZ, and ZX faces.
But simple things like rotating that 3D transform around an arbitrary rotation is basically impossible with this approach.
So …
FA 5 includes a full 3D Tetrahedron editor that allows you to manipulate the Tetrahedron (which represents the 3D transform). A tetrahedron corresponds to 3D just like a triangle corresponds to a 2D transform.
This a basic 3D modeler, which allow you to edit a 3D transform by manipulating its equivalent 3D tetrahedron.
You can switch back and forth between the 3D Tetrahedron view and the 3 Triangle face views at any time.
These features greatly simplify the steps to creating great video animations.
Concept: take 2 fractals and capture their difference as a delta animation segment.
Now that variants can create fractals that are so extremely different from the original, delta animations are they only way to capture their changes. The delta segment captures a separate animation for each property that is different between the 2 fractals.
Drag a keyframe from the Variants editor to the Sequencer. You get a new animation segment, which captures the delta between the original and variant fractals.
In the Sequencer, you can assign a different animation curve to each property — a very powerful feature.
It is so easy to create great animations, by dragging a Variants editor thumbnail and dropping it on the Sequencer.
Morph Animation Improvements
Perfect Color gradient interpolation that matches keyframe colors.
New workflow for creating smooth morph animations that don’t have instantaneous shape changes.
Take an audio file and create an animation curve from it. This is an easy way to get an animation curve for fractal animation.
Without smoothing, the resulting video animations can be gut wrenching. Audio signals are packed with high frequency noise that when sampled from create terrible animations. Jerky-jerky floppy-woppy. I can’t watch those animations myself.
A smoothed audio signal captures the essence of the audio signal, but eliminates the high frequency noise. Video animations then look so much better. But even these animations can be improved upon.
Use a simple musician’s click track to create an audio file. Now use that audio file to create an audio clip animation curve.
Result: Perfect video animation to the beat. This is the killer way to create great beat animations. You can watch and dance to these animations all day long!
Mac OS High Sierra Wide Gamut Videos & Smaller Video Sizes
Make videos that have deeper color saturation and wider dynamic range.
New Apple HEVC Codec support that creates output videos that take much less memory than H.264 codec.
The Fractal Architect 4 render engine, given robust, quality drivers, has worked on all versions of Mac OS (except partially on High Sierra because of driver problems). AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs all can be used. It supports CUDA and OpenCL.
The Apple CPU OpenCL driver has always worked over the last 7 years, so when the GPU drivers are defective, users can still use the app with CPU rendering.
Nvidia GPUs and CUDA are also supported (but not in the FA 4 Mac App store version because of app sandboxing) on both Mac OS and Windows 10.
It has been ported to Windows 10 and there it also works with AMD and Nvidia GPUS. Intel GPUs worked with 1 version of Intel’s OpenCL drivers but not with a later OpenCL driver update. (So the Windows platform is also affected by driver quality issues.)
Intel’s OpenCL driver for CPU on Windows 10 does not work with the FA 4 render engine.
The render engine is a fantastic test case for GPU compute and can be used by OpenCL and CUDA driver developers to validate the quality of their drivers. The render engine itself is open source and licensed with LGPL license.
FAEngine – FA 4 Open Source Render Engine
The app itself is even easier to use for driver quality testing on Mac OS. Metal is supported by the app (but not in the open source render engine).
Earlier versions of the render engine have worked on all versions of Mac OS since 2009.
Let’s make sure that is understood. There has never been a commercially successful product in this app category.
Right now, myself and Andreas Maschke are the most active developers in the flame fractal app category. I am the author of Fractal Architect. Andreas is the developer of JWildfire. Both our products are huge, with multiple man years of development. (For FA, it is 9 man years.) I receive testing support from Lennart Ostman, for which I am deeply grateful.
That gives the illusion of a huge team creating these products, but it is just 2 hobbyists doing what we love best. We do it for love, as I have never been paid a single cent for my time. I receive no financial support to produce this product. All test hardware is paid using app revenues. (The remainder I pay out of my own pocket.)
Fractal Architect 5 (in development) is about 3x larger than the historic Photoshop 1 when it was first released 27 years ago.
So when you expect Facebook pages, forums, blog, and tons of support, we are not Adobe with billions in revenue and 1000’s of employees. Remember I make NO money from this app.
All app revenues pays for test hardware – nothing else.