[Bf-committers] CUDA backend implementation for GSoC?

Ton Roosendaal ton at blender.org
Mon Dec 15 10:14:37 CET 2008


Hi,

Although it's very interesting to use GPU for rendering, there's a 
myriad of very complicated issues in Blender that will make this very 
unfit for students or new developers. Only after a really good new 
framework for managing geometry (render data, drawing data, exporting 
data) has been created, plus a design for a new and good definition of 
materials and shaders (shader language?) it might become interesting 
for less experienced developers to help.

Further, GSoC is only succesful for succesful developers. :)

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute BV  Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam The Netherlands

On 11 Dec, 2008, at 1:49, Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva 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
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