[Bf-committers] Render API follow-up

Giuseppe Ghibò ghibo at mandriva.com
Mon Mar 23 17:13:47 CET 2009


Yves Poissant wrote:
> From: Terrence Vergauwen
> Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 5:58 AM
>
>   
>> We have already done quite a bit of proactive research
>> since a few years into CUDA and equiv technologies,
>> and unfortunately it's not an architecture capable of
>> running a practical raytracer.
>>     
>
> More and more people are finding techniques to coax CUDA into doing 
> raytracing including implementing BIH or Kd-Trees acceleration structures on 
> CUDA. I believe it is important to keep following those efforts and learn 
> the techniques.
>
> That said, I agree that today version of CUDA have too many constraints to 
> implement a true practical (read production) raytracer. Beside, choosing 
> CUDA seems risky to me since this is a proprietary API. I would favor OpenCL 
> which is much more general as it is not targetted only to GPU but also to 
> multicore CPUs. But although nVidia, AMD and Intel have all announced that 
> they would provide OpenCL support and drivers for their next generation 
> GPUs, OpenCL is currently only at the stage of paperware for now.
>
> Beside, using technologies such as CUDA or OpenCL is really truely 
> meaningfull on the rendering side of the API. To me, though, the suggestion 
> to use CUDA in the discussion about the API is better translated into a 
> suggestion to think the next API in term of  multi-core environment, 
> distributed rendering, cloud computing. I'm not sure how this would affect

Sort of. If the API is gonna to be strongly redesigned, then it could
be worthwhile to take an eye to CUDA or CUDA-like enviroments
(parallelism basically based on shared memory) so to don't have to
regret later about bad (re)design of the API for supporting such kind
of architectures|platform, which IMHO are easily accessible.
Regarding choosing the best enviroment (like those not existing yet) I
don't know, but certainly silicon chips could help the testing far
better than paper chips... Looking at the applications table on their
site, the number of supported applications sound it is growing, and
now I see also a couple of raytracers. Of course also add support for
what could offer the future and the present about parallelization
(e.g. traverse the shared memory model to the distributed one or mix
them) could be also interesting, but maybe here just do one step at
the time.

Bye
Giuseppe.



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