[Bf-committers] OpenGL accelerated Nodes

[Bob Holcomb]

My 2 cents:

I was under the impression that the differences between floating point 
numbers representation on most graphics cards and on the cpu was 
different enough to cause artifacts in rendering?  Would this only be 
for preview or for actual rendering?  I do know that some of the latest 
video cards (my nvidia 8800 GTX for example) does support the same IEEE 
754 floating point standard, for representation, however I'm not sure 
that the process of the mathematics is exactly the same, so it may 
return slightly different results (I could run some quick tests for 
those interested).  If there is a desire for accelerated nodes, which 
ones specifically?  Some will be harder than others to put on GPU due to 
instruction limitations (again, depending on GPU).  This would be a good 
use case for a plugin-in system, which should encompass more than just 
nodes.

Cheers,

Bob