[Bf-cycles] Proposal for Compute Device Selection from Blender

[Brecht Van Lommel]

On Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 2:26 AM, Lukas Stockner
<lukas.stockner at freenet.de> wrote:
> 2. The Selection is only accessible through the User Preferences, which is pretty annoying when one wants to change it regularly.

Why would users change the selection of GPU devices regularly?

If it is e.g. to disable the display device for interactivity, then
perhaps there should be a way to disable a device for viewport renders
but enable it for final renders. Or maybe there's another reason I'm
unaware of that we can solve in a better way.

> 3. Add a "Compute Device" panel to the Render Property tab that displays a toggle button for every device, divided into sections by type. This could also be used for finer Network Rendering Server selection in the future.

Not sure about this, it breaks a pretty important UI convention.
Saving user preferences vs. saving the .blend gets confusing then?

> 4. Change the current Scene property that defines the used device so that it differentiates between CUDA and OpenCL, which allows to get rid of the Device Type property in the user properties.

The CUDA / OpenCL choice seems like a per system choice rather than a
per scene choice. If you save a .blend file on a computer with an
NVidia GPU, I want to be able to open and render it on a computer with
an AMD GPU, without having to make any scene changes every time we
exchange .blends.

Brecht.