[Bf-committers] GPU computing

[Damien Plisson]

Hi Ishan,

That's a great project to look how to leverage the GPU for blender!

Concerning the mac, only Snow Leopard provides openCL (with other parallel computing frameworks like grand central).
What's funny is that Apple strongly promotes openCL, but has not yet released any SW that uses it (Aperture/Final Cut would be good candidates ...)

I looked at this topic some time ago, and here are the info I gathered (you may have already got some):

Apple openCL doc & examples :
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/OpenCL_MacProgGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html
examples:
Julia quaternion raytraced : http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/OpenCL_RayTraced_Quaternion_Julia-Set_Example/
Procedural grass & terrain: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/OpenCL_Procedural_Grass_and_Terrain_Example/
...

There is also a paper from a nvidia guy on raytracing optimization through openCL. It presents well what impacts performance: data transfer bottleneck, and load balancing among the gpu cores:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_research_pub_011.html

I don't know the internals of blender renderer, but if you need help on the Mac (and/or ghost topics) parts, feel free to ask ;)

Good luck with openCL!
Damien

Le 25 nov. 2009 à 04:28, Ishan Arora a écrit :

>> That is, unless you're feeling ambitious. ^_^;
> Not very ambitious right now :)
> 
>> Btw, let me know if you create a proper SVN fork and I can try to help with Mac compiling, Snow Leopard only.
> Thanks for the offer. Mac would benefit the most from OpenCL.
> I am new here. One the first thing that confused me was the number of
> forks around. I was hoping to be able to submitting patches to the
> trunk. I am not really sure how things move around here.
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers