[Bf-committers] CUDA backend implementation for GSoC?

[joe]

A gpgpu subdivision surface library would be really cool.  As would having
the modifier system (especially the armature modifier) make use of it as
much as possible.  It'd also be nice if you could implement a transparent
zbuffer that used the gpu, but I don't know if that'd really possible, at
least not in a flexible enough way (depth peeling would not be acceptable in
this case).

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 5:49 PM, Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva <
miguelf at ieee.org> wrote:

> Hello Devs,
>
> First of all let me thank you for a great product!
>
> Second, I would like to make the disclaimer that I'm less than a
> newbie regarding the blender code, since I plan to build it soon but I
> still haven't even tried it.
>
> Now, I have been thinking about a nice Google Summer of Code project
> that one of my students could get involved in. I immediately thought
> that it would be a good contribution to the Blender community if
> someone took advantage of the GPU on modern cards as well as a great
> learning experience for the students. In particular, I have access to
> a few NVidia cards, which support CUDA.
>
> My thoughts were to create a layer above the rendering backend, which
> can dynamically select whether to use the CPU-based backend (current
> stuff) or a different GPU-based backend (to be developed) depending on
> whether or not there is a CUDA supported card. This would be done so
> that in the future other backends could be implemented to support the
> ATI stuff or the OpenCL, etc...
>
> However, when I started looking at the Blender Architecture docs, it
> seems this wouldn't be as easy given the many inter dependencies... My
> question are:
>
> 1. Does any of this make sense?
>
> 2. Would there be interest from the community to see something like
> this implemented? Or is anyone working on something like this?
>
> 3. Which modules would be the most to benefit from CUDA support?
>
> Any other thoughts?
>
> Thanks again for a solid Open Source piece!
>
> --Miguel
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/attachments/20081211/09f79dbd/attachment.htm