[Bf-committers] GPU-Rendering

Kester Maddock Christopher.Maddock.1 at uni.massey.ac.nz
Wed Nov 24 11:37:23 CET 2004


Hi Bart,

I played around with GLslang in tuhopuu2.  I even looked at some of Blender's 
shaders in GLSL 
(http://projects.blender.org/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/tuhopuu2/source/gameengine/Ketsji/Shaders/Shading.fs?rev=1.1&root=tuhopuu&view=auto)

It is hardware and os independent, but you have to test on both ATI, Nvidia & 
3d labs platforms since their GLSL compiler is slightly different.  It is 
also only supported on Radeon 9500 / Geforce FX and up.

The GLSL & ARB_vertex_program/ARB_fragment_program languages are really nice - 
be glad we are not working with Direct 3D. :-)

The capability is definitely enough to match Blender's software renderer, 
without AO, raytracing & radiosity (ie accelerate the transform, shading and 
rasterization.)  Ideally, you could composite the hardware accelerated parts 
of a render with software parts.

Once that is all working you can work on a GPU raytracing etc solution.  
Target the Geforce 6 cpus for this for their flow control capabilities.

The first step is to integrate GLEW (the GL extension wrangler) into blender.  
GLEW contains headers for all extensions (so you don't have to worry about 
old compilers) and makes it easy to test if hardware support is available.  
This is something I was going to ask Ton for anyway (probably target 2.37 ?)

Kester

On Wednesday 24 November 2004 11:11, Bart wrote:
> Here is an article about GLslang:
> http://www.advancedimagingmag.com/ai/script/search.asp?SearchSiteURL=\ai\ar
>ticles\2003\ai-0603\ai_06-03_05.htm
>
> And here is the official Docu:
> http://www.opengl.org/documentation/oglsl.html
>
> This is quite interesting for the game engine and the 3d viewport too.
>
> Arne Schmitz 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.
> >
> > I think it is, if you use use something like GLSlang -- or whatever it is
> > called. We have some people here that are using the new
> > ARB_fragment_program and ARB_vertex_program extensions and it allows for
> > several very interesting algorithms to be implemented on the GPU. Other
> > Renderers also use GPUs to accelerate rendering -- most notably
> > MentalRay. Although I never tried that one, but it says so in its feature
> > list. But I also think that it is not that easy to incorporate.
> > Especially if you want it to integrate with Raytracing and the like. I
> > know that Raytracing already has been done on GPUs, but the results did
> > not yet impress me that much.
> >
> > Arne
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
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-- 
The angry man always thinks he can do more than he can.
		-- Albertano of Brescia


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