Some things about the state on a Mac has already been said. Yes, Metal has been around for a while, but for a cross-platform project where most (if not all) of the real development happens on Linux, properly supporting Apple is a PITA which often throws mac support in the ‘not our problem’-category. Can’t say I blame them.
D-or-S is perfectly usable for me with something ‘as low’ as a desktop GTX 1060 card from years ago, or a RTX3050ti 35watt model in a 13" notebook. The difference with or without OpenCL is immense. So as long as the quite-descent GPU on Apple-SoC’s isn’t usable by the algorithm, yes, it’s going to be slow.
Now, wasn’t sharpen already discouraged / deprecated in 3.6 / 3.8? Anyway, I don’t even have it anymore, so I can’t look up how it behaves.
The ‘risk’ of using a module somewhere in the middle of the pipeline that isn’t properly scene-referred, means that it can’t handle ‘infinite brightness’, which means it clips data that otherwise still has to be mapped by filmic or other modules.
Now, if that isn’t the problem with ‘sharpen’, it can still be that it introduces hue-shifts or other color problems that the new scene-referred modules try so hard to prevent. But I wonder if a not-too-aggresive sharpen would really introduce lots of problems here.
But that’s up to you, of course!
As for ‘local contrast’, I know I still use the ‘old’ module all the time. Sort of for the same reason, the D-or-S module seems to work fine, but just ‘at a smaller radius’ as I would explain it. Which means the effect isn’t that strong. Also, it seems to make blacks too black for me, which causes me to apply a mask to ignore the real low shadows everytime I use D-or-S for local contrast.
Just using the older ‘local contrast’ module at the default 125% settings is so easy that I often just go with that.
But here, it’s always applied after filmic, so that it can’t clip highlights that filmic has yet to map / roll-off.
It might still introduce hue-shifts that filmic tried so hard to prevent, but since I use it subtle most of the time, I have no issues with that.
If you do, then D-or-S is the way forward.
Maybe I’ve got to dive into the manual for D-or-S again, to see to make the local-contrast preset be more to my liking and save it as a preset. I just didn’t really bother with it yet.
So, go ahead and use the older modules if you want, just know that
- they might disappear in some future version or fork
- if you got issues with highlights and one of these modules is in your pipeline before filmic, that’s likely your cause
- mac performance issues are of apple forcing their own APIs, and then people without access to those APIs not being able to develop for it anymore.