Sabrina Kilian escreveu:
> nemesis wrote:
>> You already commit to the idea, so I think I did a good job.  But sorry
>> for the rudeness anyway.  Military tactics, dear. ;)
> 
> Military tactics only work if you can step up and lead. Otherwise . . .

you're right.  I'm only Private Joker playing of Sergeant Hartman.

> Right, they bring a dramatic speed increase to other systems and
> programs, so you THINK they will here as well. Prove it, or wait.

I would think pov-ray's triangle handling to be similar to that of other 
raytracers but if that's not the case, I'll just wait for your word on 
it, sweetie.

> If I start testing, and find an 8 fold decrease in speed, does this
> indicate a problem with my set up, or with the code, or with the API?

In that thread, they run into all of them.  oh teh fun!  might be of 
much help to not duplicate the same errors.

notice also that OpenCL drivers are still alfa/beta quality.

>> Might be of help to see how they are doing there, complete with benchmarks:
>>
>> http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2947
>>
>> very long thread full of juicy stuff.
>>
> 
> 30 odd pages, if you have a specific part that you think would be
> helpful, a direct link would be better. I will keep trawling it.

No, I didn't read it all either, much less the later pages.  The talk 
about float4 vectors might interest you.

> Depends on the card, again. If the card is only offering double or
> triple the FLOPs of the FPU/CPU, then the speed loss by faking it in
> software will not be better. Wide range of hardware, remember?

Wide range of hardware has never prevented povray running on low-end 
hardware or super-duper minicomputers.  Users never complained of the 
vastly different speeds.

Shoot for the best, darling.

> Anyone have a good double precision faking library for CUDA? I guess I
> could write that as a first program, but why start from scratch?

So you'll be targetting CUDA?  It's not cross-platform as OpenCL, 
although much more mature for now.

> If you happen to have a computer with a high end GPU that I can run
> comparison benchmarks on, great. Otherwise, my development time will be
> limited to how often I can ship code off to friends and get benchmarks
> and profiles.

sadly, I'm already an old wig with a Q6600 and a cheap nvidia card (9400 
GT if I remember correctly).


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