POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : GPU / RTX support for Povray Server Time
28 Mar 2024 17:55:57 EDT (-0400)
  GPU / RTX support for Povray (Message 1 to 4 of 4)  
From: Heriberto Delgado
Subject: GPU / RTX support for Povray
Date: 11 Aug 2021 13:30:00
Message: <web.611407eb794a401eb070ed6f3ac0d7d9@news.povray.org>
Is there any hope whatsoever of seeing, in the near future, a hardware-supported
version of Povray able to run on modern GPU-enabled hardware? Especially now
that there is support for technologies such as RTX available for everyone to
use?


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From: Mr
Subject: Re: GPU / RTX support for Povray
Date: 11 Aug 2021 19:45:00
Message: <web.61145ff48a4655686adeaecb3f378f2@news.povray.org>
"Heriberto Delgado" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Is there any hope whatsoever of seeing, in the near future, a hardware-supported
> version of Povray able to run on modern GPU-enabled hardware? Especially now
> that there is support for technologies such as RTX available for everyone to
> use?

On the one hand you can build POV and get it to demonstrate unrivaled
performances on Arm based architectures that have big number of cores be they
heavy performance or as lightweight as the average Android phone... I would say
that more people can access these than an RTX. And it's not even slow /
overheating / nor firelied on them ! So the strategy of pov developers to focus
on multi processing rather than specific hardware seems like it is starting to
pay at last.

When you look at renderers that took the opposite strategy such as Arnold and
Cycles, they all are englued in denoiser quests and slowness / data amounts
bottlenecks complaints so that big companies pipelines always switch to their
CPU modes (this is mentioned in several CG Society topics)

From looking at all the previous topics asking a similar request, if you really
want to put some modern Graphics card to heavy use, it seems you'd be better off
investing your time into these mentioned alternatives (one of which is also free
and open source) Because if I remember correctly the pov team also said that if
they do speed up anything with graphics cards it may not be what you expect.


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From: Alain Martel
Subject: Re: GPU / RTX support for Povray
Date: 12 Aug 2021 18:43:22
Message: <6115a40a$1@news.povray.org>

> Is there any hope whatsoever of seeing, in the near future, a hardware-supported
> version of Povray able to run on modern GPU-enabled hardware? Especially now
> that there is support for technologies such as RTX available for everyone to
> use?
> 

The main problem here is that POV-Ray is primitive based, NOT mesh based.
GPU rendering is heavily mesh optimized. They can process in parallel, 
but only if all threads need to use the same base code. With POV-Ray, 
there is no universal geometry handling code : Each and every primitive 
require different code and GPU just can't cope with that requirement.


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From: yesbird
Subject: Re: GPU / RTX support for Povray
Date: 7 Jan 2022 06:40:00
Message: <web.61d8245e8a465568ded9818410800fb2@news.povray.org>
Alain Martel <kua### [at] videotronca> wrote:
>
> The main problem here is that POV-Ray is primitive based, NOT mesh based.
> GPU rendering is heavily mesh optimized. They can process in parallel,
> but only if all threads need to use the same base code. With POV-Ray,
> there is no universal geometry handling code : Each and every primitive
> require different code and GPU just can't cope with that requirement.

Hi,

this is my first post here, so I would like to say thanks for the great renderer
I am familiar with since last century (about  1993). Now I am back to it and
glad to discover a lot of new features and improvements.

As to rendering CSG-based scenes on GPU, I found two interesting papers that
would like to share with you:

https://www.scitepress.org/papers/2017/61364/61364.pdf
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1576/090.pdf


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