2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
I have recently "upgraded" my desktop from a nice self built i5 3.5ghz 4core, 16gb ram, fast nvme ssd to a HP z420 with E5-2670 cpu @2.6ghz on 8 cores+HT, 48GB ram, SATA SSD.
I was hoping that the increase in ram and cpu cores would speed up processing but it doesn't seem to be any faster, if not slower.
I see different things getting taxed more at different phases of a run.
What is the most "needed" thing to run APP as far as PC hardware?
A fast SSD will benefit you the most and increased memory rgarding processing larger data-sets. Mabula is working on getting the GPU to be used more, this will be a feature in a future release and that will speed processing up by a lot. You did select more memory and cores in the settings right? You have to restart APP to make use of the new settings.
@vincent-mod
I am tagging along here, i have a mosaic registration running in v1.075, (see screenprint) and APP is only using 1 core.Â
A number of functions run multi-threaded:
Some parts are seemingly single-threaded:
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I know, i was responsing to Vincent's remark about using the GPU, it would be nice to use all possible cores first? (This iterative process is taking >24 hrs now for each trial i do on a really fast machine with the 70 panels).
In an ideal world you can just flick a switch and it is all multi-threaded, but it becomes a software development/architecture problem to solve. Mabula's a clever bloke - I'm sure any optimisations that can be coded as multi-threaded are on his backlog.
Utilising GPU libraries will be the icing on the cake, as naturally those have been developed to make extensive use of the amount of dedicated cores the GPUs have to play with. When we see that GPU libs can be taken advantage of, your I/O then becomes your bottleneck - that's when your disks (or even RAM speed) becomes the issue. Remember - you never remove bottlenecks in IT, you just move them elsewhere.
I don't know the specifics for why this is the case, I can imagine it has to do with what AstroCookbook pointed to but Mabula can say more about that. The GPU is most likely "easier" to implement for certain processes.
