[Bf-committers] GPU computing

[Matt Ebb]

On 25/11/2009, at 8:26 AM, Istvan burbank wrote:

> I know little to nothing about this, but the rendering engine as a
> whole was thrown out there, and deemed not the best area. But what if
> it was more specific? What if only the ray tracing (AO, refl, transp
> etc) were the only part done by the gpu? That might be a smaller task,
> and more feasible a project. Maybe ray tracing isn't the best part,
> but the concept could be any 'part' of the rendering engine.

Because Blender's renderer (and many offline renderers) don't really  
work that way, it's not often easy to just separate out a 'part'  
because all those different things are integrated together in the  
shading pipeline. Not only does it make it difficult to code, but I  
understand you also have issues with speed of data transfer. Not to  
mention further refactor work possibly coming down the line which  
would make it all worthless too.

Really, the easiest way to use gpu-assisted rendering is to write a  
completely new renderer from scratch utilising gpu hardware fully and  
interface blender with it. Now that there's the render API it's a lot  
easier too.

Matt