On 23.03.2010 16:15, Christian Van Brussel wrote: > - you are talking about multi-threading the lighting process. It seems to > me that it is better to parallelize the process on the GPU instead of the > multi-cores CPU. I'm not sure whether it is better to do it through some > shaders or CUDA/OpenCL (which are not yet supported by all graphic cards).
Some thoughts: - This is IMO better fitting for CUDA/OpenCL than OpenGL shaders: it fits better into lighter2's "no actual rendering" approach. - Isn't OpenCL intended to blur between GPU and CPU processing, anyway? That would take care of the multi-core vs GPU acceleration question anyway. - The problem could also be approached on a conceptual level: at the base, the currently serial lighting has to be turned into a processing of distinct, independent chunks. Once that is done, with correct abstraction it would arguably be possible to later add alternative processing implementations, eg "classic" threads in addition to OpenCL or vice versa. - For OpenCL, keep in mind that lighter2 should keep working even if OpenCL is not available! (Implementations only start to pop up now, so this is a very real possibility.) With this is mind, an approach like "flexible design, CPU/multi-core first, GPU/OpenCL later" might be most desireable. Hmm. This starts to look complicated. Networking is beyond the scope of any SoC project to start with... but even "simple" parallelization doesn't seem so simple any more. Taking all what I said above into consideration makes lighter2 parallelization a project on it's own merits, it certainly seems to be out of proportion as an "appendix" to photon lighting. With the specific application in question, points 1,2,4,5,6 without 3 seem more than plenty for a project. They all fit nicely under an umbrella of "improved lighting with photon mapping". I'd rather see quality in implementation(+ results ;) than a quantity of features. -f.r.
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev
_______________________________________________ Crystal-main mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crystal-main Unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
