[Bf-committers] GPU computing

[joe]

Our render archetecture doesn't lend itself to gpu-type processing.
You might be able to hack in something for e.g. soft shadows or
whatever, but I think that would be a mistake; such an effort should
be coordinated with the other refactors we need to do there, and I
don't know if anyone even knows when those refactors will happen, or
what their final form will be.

Joe

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Charles Wardlaw
<cwardlaw at marchentertainment.com> wrote:
>>
>> Animation is a big part of blender, and faster subsurf/armature
>> systems would be very, very helpful.  To be honest it'd be far more
>> helpful then faster physics or rendering systems, and you'd have a
>> much better shot at success.
>>
>
> I would love to see GPGPU-enabled armature calculations... Although, since
> many of the best rigs require custom python scripts I wonder if Python
> wouldn't be a bottleneck there.
>
> On the renderer: you wouldn't have to rewrite everything.  Not every part of
> the rendering process benefits from multiprocessing anyways, just like not
> every part benefits from the various data structures.  But there've been a
> number of nice papers on using GPGPU processing to accelerate the parts of
> rendering that tend to be the most heavy -- ray collisions, subdivision (as
> you said above), ambient occlusion, or even the generation of point clouds
> for other purposes (AO, GI, FG).  If Blender could generate point clouds
> quickly and that data could be accessed and exported, a lot of studios would
> be very interested.
>
> There's also the idea of accelerating nodes in the compositing or texture
> graphs.  And now that sculpt is multithreaded, I wonder how hard it would be
> to get some of the processing offloaded to OpenCL cores.
>
> Then again, hardware-accelerated subdivision is a serious boon.  At work
> we're using Mach Studio, which is a GPU-based real-time rendering system.
>  It subdivides on the fly, on the card, and even with a few million polys in
> a scene you have completely interactive turnarounds.  Less so with
> full-scene AO, but it's still usable.  The last version released something
> akin to the DX11 Tessellator functionality on DX10 cards, and watching it
> generate a million polygons from a bump map and a plane is something to
> behold.
>
> ~ C
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