[Bf-funboard] GPU accelerated rendering

[Konrad Haenel]

Some obvious idea considering today's hardware:

GPU accelerated rendering

Recently the "Parthenon"-renderer was mentioned in the blender.org 
forums. It's a DirectX-accelerated full-GI renderer with, IMHO, 
unbelievable rendering-speed. Which is no wonder considering the visual 
detail modern graphic-cards can display in real-time.

I think the whole idea of harvesting the GPU's power for faster 
rendering will become one of the major topics in the next generation of 
3D-applications and I'd really love to be able to use something like it 
in Blender.

It doesn't have to be GI like in Parthenon, but a simple 
hardware-accelerated rendering including

- textures for color and normals
- lambert- and blinn-shading
- all lights with their parameters like intensity, color, 
falloff-distance etc.
- shadow maps
- z-transparency
- anti-aliasing

would ease work on animations a lot.

For fascinating examples and even more fascinating rendering-times check out

http://www.bee-www.com/parthenon/index.htm

Greetings,

Konrad
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www.konrad-haenel.de