[Bf-committers] Antw.: Is Cycles going to support OpenCL 1.0 ?

[Antony Riakiotakis]

On 8 December 2011 13:06, Thomas Dinges <blender at dingto.org> wrote:
> Well, I don't think we need to discuss that. AMD 4xxx cards were not designed for OpenCL, the support was added later via driver. It's the same on nvidia, the Femi cards were the first, designed for CUDA.
>
> The fault is therefore not on our side and discussions won't solve it. ;)
>

This is hardly a good reply. Of course OpenCL support is added through
the driver, hardware simply executes opcodes. The support was added
after all, so people still expect to be able to use it. A discussion
will make people understand so it solves any suspicions of bias. My
understanding is that certain features or extensions either run on
software or are missing. If people can know them though, and know
their importance they can be more understanding. And more importantly,
they can stop feeling that the developers are biased towards NVIDIA.

Anyways, here are some references:

http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/pages/DriverCompatibility.aspx,
where you can clearly see that GPUs have beta OpenCL support
(unfortunately couldn't find the conformance results)

http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/assets/AMD_Accelerated_Parallel_Processing_OpenCL_Programming_Guide.pdf,
where, if you check under AppendixD the lowest GPUs mentioned are
series 5.

http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/assets/AMD_APP_SDK_Getting_Started_Guide_v2.4.pdf
check section 5 supported devices, where all the features supported
are enumerated.