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Robert Wenzlaff wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid200410190845.02519.rwenzlaff@soylent-green.com"
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<pre wrap="">On Tuesday 19 October 2004 06:49, Bart wrote:
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<pre wrap="">Here is another interesting thing about GPU rendering:
Nvidia Gelato
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html">http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html</a>
Bart wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">Hey this would be amazing!!!
car wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">Oh wow that is some nice stuff for the render times ... One can only
hope that others here will try and do that with the GPU...
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
The problems I see with GPU assisted rendering, is the fact that no standard
has shaken out of the industry yet. If you are a pro-house using custom
tools, you can specify "All computers for this movie will have BrandX ModelY
graphics cards" (Note who nVidia is targeting with the Gelato link...
"Gelato offers all the features that film and television customers demand
today, and is both flexible and extensible allowing for easy integration into
your existing production pipeline"...) .
For GPU assisted disply/editing we have such a standard, OpenGL (and even that
causes us fits sometimes). For a general purpose app that must strive to
support all decent GPU's, there are basically two paths to go by:
1) Wait for a standard to settle out. It could be a while, each GPU
manufacturer wants to lock customers into their cards. There's little
advantage to standardizing (for them) as long as they have a chance to reach
the top. (Note how Gelato ships with an API, not an input/output format.
I'll bet that when/if ATI ships a similar product, their API will be
incompatible with nVidia's. Whose API do we hardcode in?)
2) Make a standard interface to Blender's rendering engine that can take
"plug-in libraries" that convert what they can to a specific GPU API and
returns the render data in the form Blender expects. This means that anyone
wanting GPU assisted rendering for CardX would need to write, or find someone
to write the infterface for their card. If a standard does shake out, then
that plug-in lib will be the "official" one. A lot of this work is already
being done to support external renderers.
I'll bet a renderman compliant interface to the GPU will be something that
most manufacturers will ship, or will become available through 3rd party
efforts (Gelato has one, and it's even free and Open Source!), so it may take
care of itself once the Blenderman project is up and running. Instead of
dividing the developer community on GPU specific tasks, let's leverage GPU
assisted rendering to the advantage of an existing, general use, project.
On-the-fly RIB import/export gives us Gelato _and so much more_....
The point is, yes, it's a cool idea. Running blindly to chase every cool idea
via the quickest/dirtiest method is not a cool idea. There's a lot of cool
ideas out there that have ended up as dead-ends. (Hey, let's start a
Blender.org project that will let us save our output to Betamax!)
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My knowledge of OpenGL is a little too limited to know an answer to
this question:<br>
<br>
Is it possible to save definite frames of OpenGL-output to files?<br>
<br>
If it is, and I would be surprised if it isn't, I think all of the
above doesn't apply. In case we can use a highly standartized API it
won't matter what brand of GPU is used to render the output. That's
what APIs are for, isn't it?<br>
<br>
Anyway, even if certain manufacturer-specific criteria have to be met
it basically comes down to ATI and nVIDIA. It's safe to assume that
there won't be any more major players in the 3D-card field in the
forseeable future. No kidding, if someone can assure me that he will
deliver a GPU-renderer with the features I proposed in my original mail
within the next 3 months I'll buy and send him a Radeon 9600 XT just to
make it happen.<br>
<br>
And a third point: like in any open-source project the paradigm applies
here as well: "publish soon, publish often". Once a GPU-renderer is
available in a usable fashion it will be a project creating lots of
interest, even if it isn't the best possible solution. I highly doubt
that this is something that might lead to a "dead end", the comparison
to the Betamax-project is way out of place here.<br>
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