[Bf-cycles] Boltzmann Initiative and Cycles?

Sergey Sharybin sergey.vfx at gmail.com
Tue Nov 17 08:14:11 CET 2015


While tis is an interesting concept, will it be same rock-solid as bare
CUDA itself or will have same weird issues as we've got with OpenCL
kernels? That's more a rithorical questions, but something we should keep
in mind.

As for OpenCL -- to my knowledge Intel is currently very interested in it.
Also AMD improved OpenCL quite a lot in the past year, so don't think
OpenCL really dying.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 2:24 AM, Brecht Van Lommel <
brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:

> This seems to be AMD's equivalent to the NVidia CUDA toolkit. The main
> interesting thing for Cycles is that this can compile to both AMD GPUs
> and NVidia GPUs (still using the CUDA toolkit underneath though).
>
> It remains to be seen if using this is actually a good idea for
> Cycles, there's a bunch of questions:
>
> * What are the advantages over OpenCL, why use this instead of an open
> standard?
> * What about Intel GPUs? Do we need OpenCL for those anyway, and if so
> why not use OpenCL for AMD too?
> * Or is this a sign that OpenCL is slowly dying, and eventually we'll
> have no choice but to use this?
> * Will all CUDA features that we use be available and will performance
> be equally good?
> * Will this work on OS X? NVidia has their own extra CUDA driver
> there, will AMD provide the same?
> * Does it allow dynamic loading, so that a single Blender executable
> works on all computers regardless of the GPU?
>
> IF this can replace CUDA and OpenCL backends in Cycles then that could
> simplify things, but it would be unfortunate to give up on OpenCL and
> go with something proprietary instead.
>
> I still hope the eventually there will be proper OpenCL support from
> all vendors, or even better, native support for GPUs in LLVM Clang.
> But so far the fragmentation isn't getting any better, with Apple
> choosing Metal over Vulkan, NVidia not supporting OpenCL properly, and
> OpenCL not providing enough control for optimal CPU performance.
>
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 5:52 PM, Zauber Paracelsus <zauber at gridmail.org>
> wrote:
> > So, AMD has launched what they call the Boltzmann Initiative, with the
> > apparent aim to create a compiler that allows CUDA to work on AMD
> > graphics hardware.
> >
> > And I just have to wonder: what affect would this have on
> > Blender/Cycles, especially in light of the relatively recent addition of
> > the OpenCL split-kernel work?
> >
> >
> > PS: Sorry for not providing a link, but doing so caused my original
> > message to be blocked by the spam filters.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Bf-cycles at blender.org
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-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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