[Bf-committers] GPU-Rendering

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Although I agree that GPU rendering is extremely interesting to  
explore, especially to develop a high end renderer for it, the horrible  
reality is that even trying to improve one thing in Blender's usage of  
OpenGL (no ugly frontbuffer drawing, but draw in backbuffer and flush  
to front with 1 single call) already gives a myriad of issues in  
implementation differences in all types of 3D cards, drivers and OS-es  
people use.

I think it's very nice to support a very large set of hardware/OS  
configurations, but that's also a very conservative force pushing us  
back to using OpenGL 1.1 (maybe 1.2) only for the time being. How far  
do we want to stretch this? How long to keep supporting old hardware?  
Difficult issues for a 3D program like Blender...

What could be done however, is using what yafray already is doing - and  
soon I hope with Aqsis - to make it an external rendering plugin. A  
team working on such renderer then can just target on these 3D cards  
and OS-es that support it.

-Ton-


On 23 Nov, 2004, at 22:40, Tom Musgrove wrote:

> Am Dienstag, 23. November 2004 22:18 schrieb Johannes Langlotz:
>> gpu rendering isn't really interesting for blender. you have to code  
>> it
>> for every graphics card individually. and i believe this is NOT os
>> independent.
>
> Except that isn't true, here is what I posted to bf-funboard,
>
> [QUOTE]
> Those of you who are interested in actually doing this should have a  
> look at
> the course notes from Siggraph this year
>
> http://www.gpgpu.org/s2004/
>
> especially from the 3rd lecture though the 5th, after you've read  
> those.
> Head over to sourceforge and get brook.
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/brook
>
> Note that it has been designed so that the shader languages can be  
> compiled
> to it.  It is a fairly simple and intuitive addition to standard C,  
> and can
> be compiled to ATI, Nvidia, or reverts to the regular processor if it  
> either
> of those cards aren't available.
> [/QUOTE]
>
> Tom M.
> LetterRip
>
>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org