POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : GPU rendering : Re: GPU rendering Server Time
7 Sep 2024 05:09:04 EDT (-0400)
  Re: GPU rendering  
From: Kevin Wampler
Date: 18 Jul 2008 01:55:09
Message: <4880303d$1@news.povray.org>
I haven't done any GPU programming myself, but from what I've gathered 
from friends who have modern GPUs are essentially fully programmable 
architectures these days, so you can use them to boost the speed of 
computations which have seemingly little to do with actually displaying 
things on the screen (for instance, I believe that folding@home can use 
the GPU).

It probably depends on what graphics card you have as to weather or not 
you can do this on it, but you might take a look at CUDA, a C compiler 
revently released by nvidia that allows you to write things for the GPU:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html

You'll, of course, need to design your IFS algorithm so that it can be 
run in a highly parallel manner, but unless I'm missing something that 
should be pretty straightforward in this case (just run multiple 
iterators simultaneously).  Of course, not having ever done this sort of 
thing increases the chances that I'll have missed something :-)


Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> OK, so for anybody who knows about such things... Would it be feasible 
> to render an Iterated Function System image using a GPU? And would it be 
> any faster than using the CPU?
>


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