[Bf-committers] partial/hiearchical viewport upgrading for cycles - idea

[Piotr Arłukowicz]

Hi Devs! :)

I've just seen the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ianMNs12ITc

which shows nice viewport performance. Then, the sudden idea comes to my
mind, and I'm curious if it will be possible to implement in Cycles.
However, it is not related directly to the video.

The idea is the following: during viewport updates, after we
rotate/move/change scene (even smallest part) there is the whole picture
recalculated again, causing quite a huge noise for a short time.

What if we SLOW down this upgrade viewport process a bit, by hiding the
first coarse noise?

So, maybe it will be possible to introduce a way of partial updates, or a
kind of hierarchic updates, where the screen will remain in it's previous
form, and only the mostly changed pixels will be drawn on top of the
previous one? I'm sure you'll better know what is possible and what will be
good for viewport efficiency, so I let this idea to lay down before you,
and I'm curious what will you say!

Thank you for all your hard work!

best regards!

Piotr Arłukowicz, PhD
University of Gdańsk, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics
Division of Artificial Intelligence, Wit Stwosz 57, 80-952 Gdańsk, room 121
phone: +48585232125, University home page: http://inf.ug.edu.pl/~piotao
Also: Polish Blender Course: http://polskikursblendera.pl/ [PL]