[Bf-committers] CUDA backend implementation for GSoC?

[Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Xavier Thomas wrote:
> 2008/12/11 Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva
<snip>
>> 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...
>>
<snip>
>>
>> Any other thoughts?
>>
> Hi,
>
> I thing such a dev can be cool but only if not limited to windows+nvidia, so
> OpenCL may be a better way to go than CUDA.
>
> xavier

Certainly it would not be limited to windows, since CUDA is
cross-platform. The idea would be to provide an abstract layer that
uses the best implementation for the platform.

OpenCL seems like it would allow to have a single implementation that
supports all modern cards. However, OpenCL is still very new... I'll
look into this.

Thanks for the comments.

--Miguel