[Bf-committers] Cycles CUDA Toolkit 8 transition

[Sergey Sharybin]

Hey everyone,

In order to make Cycles officially support new Pascal cards (GTX 10x0) it
is crucial to use CUDA Toolkit 8. While it is still in the RC stage we
started looking into making it official one for Cycles.

There is already some initial work done:

- Tweaks are done to Cycles kernel to have same level of inlined functions
(new toolkit barely used inlined functions, which resulted in poor
performance on all cards)
- New toolkit was installed onto all release environments and buildbots.

So on a positive side, next buildbot's builds will support Pascal cards,
yay! :)

But unfortunately, while i've managed to keep Kepler cards (GTX760) same
performance as before, we had a report from Jens in IRC about Maxwell cards
having a poor performance yet again (in his case, up to 40% worse).

This is really unacceptable, we'll keep working on solution for this issue.
It might take some time, so just be aware and please be patient :)

I will keep posted here with our progress.

-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin