Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
I am looking to get a new system soon and want to make sure that I get something that APP can take full advantage of. I'll be processing some very large subexposures (122MB from the ASI6200 Color and Mono). I would assume LOTS of memory, and LOTS of cores, but what about the GPU? Or if I have a good GPU, can I get fewer processing cores? How is the Vulkan & Metal (MacOS) API work related to this?
Right now I have a 4.2 Ghz i7 with 32G RAM and Radeon Pro 580 (8GB), and it will take pretty about 7 or 8 hours to fully process about 200 subs (5 nights). I'd like to get something that can speed that up. My assumption is that the GPU processing that is being worked on WILL add a major speed boost. So I want to be ready for that once it's available, but I would also like to get something that will work with the versions now.
Roy
I'll be watching this issue with great interest since I recently bought an ASI6200 mono as well and am looking to buy a new MacBook precisely for processing the images.
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Wouter
Well, that's already a nice setup so those sub exposures are large indeed. Basically it's all about the amount of cores, memory, disk speed and definitely for the future a nice GPU. I would advice to go for a desktop if possible as these tend to be cheaper in comparison to raw performance (and still have better performance overall anyway). The new Threadripper CPU's from AMD are amazing for this, then a nice M.2 SSD directly on your motherboard for the processing part, as much memory as you can put in and a good GPU. Basically any GPU would already give a speed boost when Vulkan is added and this should work on either NVidia or AMD. If you want to keep it with MacOS, also there a desktop would be better (though getting expensive very fast). If you do simply need a laptop, I would go for something like the new 16" Macbook. It has a dedicated graphics card.
You can also think about keeping MacOS as your work laptop and buying a Windows or Linux machine that you can spec to your need and upgrade parts on when needed. That might even be the cheapest option.
When Vulkan is added is not known to me, I do know it's a pretty complicated thing to add, so will take time.
