[Bf-committers] Proposal: Blender OpenCL compositor

[Jeroen Bakker]

On 01/15/2011 03:55 PM, (Ry)akiotakis (An)tonis wrote:
> On 15 January 2011 09:19, Matt Ebb<matt at mke3.net>  wrote:
>> While I can believe that there will be dedicated online farms set up
>> for this sort of thing I was more referring to farms in animation
>> studios, most of which are not designed around GPU power - now, and
>> nor probably for a while in the future. Even imagining if in the
>> future blender uses openCL heavily, if a studio has not designed a
>> farm specifically for blender (which is quite rare), CPU performance
>> will continue to be very important. I'm curious how openCL translates
>> to CPU multiprocessing performance, especially in comparison with
>> using something like blender's existing pthread wrapper.
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> Matt
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> I have to disagree on that. Almost every 'serious' user today has an
> OpenCL capable GPU and they can benefit from an OpenCL implementation.
> Besides OpenCL allows for utilization of both CPU and GPU at the same
> time. It's not as if it sets a restriction on CPUs.
In my understanding the issue is that internal renderfarms have no 
'OpenCL' capable GPU (yet). It is not an issue on the user side. Like 
during durian, we have workstations with medium gpu's and only cpu based 
renderfarm. The question is how would a cpu-based renderfarm benefit 
from opencl?

Users on the otherhand have different issues. Our user population also 
have non OpenCL capable hardware/OS's. therefore we still need a full 
CPU-based fallback or the bulletsolution by implementing an own opencl 
driver. The bullet solution is complicated in our situation as it needs 
a lot of external references (compilers, linkers, loaders etc)

Jeroen