On 20-1-2010 21:03, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
>>>> Thank you.  I appreciate your open-mindedness.  I can perfectly accept
>>>> lack of human resources as a fine excuse, the others are just BS.

Nemesis: again, you are not qualified to judge that.

>>> I haven't really seen any valid *technical* reason why something like POV
>>> couldn't be ported to CUDA or OpenCL and run fine on the latest 3D cards.

Nemesis: no, you have not seen a reason that convinces you. That is not 
the same, given that you are not qualified to judge the technical merit.

>>> Most of the technical arguments against it are only valid for older cards
>>> (eg lack of double support, limits of number of instructions and
>>> branching etc).
>>   I repeat: If it's seemingly so easy, please go ahead and just do it.
>> All the material is there, ready to be put together. What are you waiting
>> for?
> 
> He didn't say it was easy, he said there is no reason why it would be 
> currently *impossible*.
> 
Nor did he say that it would be faster using a GPU. Only that all 
partial implementations are faster than POV.

It may be true that all requirements have been met individually (though 
I seriously doubt that, but that might take weeks to figure out given 
the large amount of research activity) and that there for there is no 
reason why the combination should be impossible in principle. To reach 
the goals shortcuts have been made and I am not in a position to judge 
if they are compatible. Experience tells me that the change that all 
optimizations are orthogonal is extremely small.
Just to find out if it is possible in principle would take another few 
weeks of dedicated study. After finding out that they can in principle 
be combined, figuring out if there is a way to do that that is still 
faster than a CPU is most probably months. And then it has to be 
implemented. When you reach the conclusion that it cannot be done within 
a week someone will come up with a new idea and you have to start all 
over again.
Given that most people here have only about a day per week max to devote 
to such a project, we are talking about several years of work with a 
high chance of failure. With a high change of starting all over before 
the project is finished because of new developments.
If you do this outside an academic environment or a lab of a big 
industry you don't stand a change.

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