Apple M1, Chess Software and CrossOver (Advice Needed)

[BrendanJNorman]

Hey guys,

So I managed to get some chess software (Fritz, Arena, etc) working on the Mac via crossover.

But does anyone know how to configure, tell it to find the GPU (for Lc0 esp) and so on?

I can't seem to find a setting for such things?!

Thanks in advance to anyone who points me in the right direction.

Also, which versions of Lc0, Stockfish, etc should I choose? This is all new territory to me.

[Magnum]

Hey guys,

So I managed to get some chess software (Fritz, Arena, etc) working on the Mac via crossover.

But does anyone know how to configure, tell it to find the GPU (for Lc0 esp) and so on?

I can't seem to find a setting for such things?!

Thanks in advance to anyone who points me in the right direction.

Also, which versions of Lc0, Stockfish, etc should I choose? This is all new territory to me.

Start with something easier first like:
BanksiaGUI for MacOS
+ Homebrew LC0

[Sopel]

Lc0 is useless on M1 because there's no way for it to use the hardware.

[Magnum]

Lc0 is useless on M1 because there's no way for it to use the hardware.

Feel free to contact the LC0 developer.

[George Sobala]

Compile Stockfish from source. It is pretty trivial. Whatever brew serves up is way slower, I don't know how they managed to mess this up.

lc0 is a problem. The latest net architectures (78xxxx 79xxxx 80xxxx) have features that are only supported in the latest CUDA backends. The GPU opencl backend will work (slowly, compared to nVidia) with older net architectures. The blas CPU backend (using Apple Accelerate framework) will work very slowly with 79xxxx and 80xxxx nets. You will need to learn how to compile from source. I use lc0 remotely from my MBA on an Windows RTX3080.

Also, I would recommend Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro as the best GUI.

[Sopel]

Lc0 is useless on M1 because there's no way for it to use the hardware.

Feel free to contact the LC0 developer.

why would I do that?

[wickedpotus]

Lc0 is useless on M1 because there's no way for it to use the hardware.

Feel free to contact the LC0 developer.

Maybe Magnum could start to reach out to Apple about OpenCL support and performance issues in general and post their response here?

I doubt unpaid developers find it worth to focus on proprietary stuff as long as it a) isn't significantly better perfromance than alternatives or b) gets lackluster support from the vendor itself to the open-source community.