[Bf-committers] GPU computing

[Ishan Arora]

Hi,

It seems we all agree on using OpenCL. Btw, I am on a windows machine.
If any of you are on some other platforms then I could use your help
in building OpenCL based code on your platforms.

I think it makes sense to start with something small, but CPU
intensive. I guess the most suitable candidate right now is
subdivision. What about point clouds?

Like I said before, I am just getting familiar with Blender's code. It
would be nice if someone could direct me to where the original code
for subdivision is.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 3:00 AM, Matt Ebb <matt at mke3.net> wrote:
>
> 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
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