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From: jhu
Subject: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 25 Jul 2011 03:50:00
Message: <web.4e2d1fcce45434ac53ab8e5e0@news.povray.org>
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2346334&cid=36867000

This  particular post on slashdot was interesting. Mental Ray can use the GPU
and throws thousands of threads at it mostly due to waiting for elements in main
 memory. How feasible is this for Povray?


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From: Alain
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 25 Jul 2011 10:24:47
Message: <4e2d7caf@news.povray.org>

> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2346334&cid=36867000
>
> This  particular post on slashdot was interesting. Mental Ray can use the GPU
> and throws thousands of threads at it mostly due to waiting for elements in main
>   memory. How feasible is this for Povray?
>
>
>

There is a big problem. When you programm a GPU, you can't use the same 
code for an ATI, an nVidia or an Intel one.
WHO have 10 graphic cards in his computer?

Also, to my knowlege, GPU still don't do double precision FP operations, 
only single precision. POV-Ray require double precision for most of it's 
computations, hardware supported triple or quadruple presision would be 
nice.

GPUs are made to work only on triangles, POV-Ray use several, 
non-teselated, primitives. You'd only be able to render triangles, 
meshes and bicubic parches on the GPU.


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From: jhu
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 25 Jul 2011 13:05:00
Message: <web.4e2da19e266590a260d9c55b0@news.povray.org>
ATI and NVidia GPUs have had 64-bit float since 2008. I would imagine parts of
Povray could be rewritten with OpenCL to take advantage of these things. GPUs
are fairly general purpose nowadays.


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From: nemesis
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 25 Jul 2011 13:30:01
Message: <web.4e2da706266590a2273b877e0@news.povray.org>
http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/04/kajiyas-scene-from-rendering-equation.html

No polygons there, just spheres.  They recreated in real-time on a GPU the
original scene from Kajiya's paper on the rendering equation and a path tracer.

Even blender got its own fast GPU path tracer these days, though it certainly
uses polygons:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering

last pages show incredible stuff...


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From: Alain
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 25 Jul 2011 17:49:46
Message: <4e2de4fa@news.povray.org>

> http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/04/kajiyas-scene-from-rendering-equation.html
>
> No polygons there, just spheres.  They recreated in real-time on a GPU the
> original scene from Kajiya's paper on the rendering equation and a path tracer.
>
> Even blender got its own fast GPU path tracer these days, though it certainly
> uses polygons:
>
>
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering
>
> last pages show incredible stuff...
>
>

There is still the isue that, if you don't have an nVidia chip with 
CUDA, it won't work at all...


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From: jhu
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 26 Jul 2011 01:55:00
Message: <web.4e2e55d6266590a253ab8e5e0@news.povray.org>
Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:

> > http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/04/kajiyas-scene-from-rendering-equation.html
> >
> > No polygons there, just spheres.  They recreated in real-time on a GPU the
> > original scene from Kajiya's paper on the rendering equation and a path tracer.
> >
> > Even blender got its own fast GPU path tracer these days, though it certainly
> > uses polygons:
> >
> >
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-renderin
g
> >
> > last pages show incredible stuff...
> >
> >
>
> There is still the isue that, if you don't have an nVidia chip with
> CUDA, it won't work at all...

Incorrect. ATI/AMD users can install Stream SDK for OpenCL to work.


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From: Ive
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 27 Jul 2011 00:53:56
Message: <4e2f99e4$1@news.povray.org>
Am 25.07.2011 19:02, schrieb jhu:
> ATI and NVidia GPUs have had 64-bit float since 2008. I would imagine parts of
> Povray could be rewritten with OpenCL to take advantage of these things. GPUs
> are fairly general purpose nowadays.
>
>
Note that support for double precision floating point types is *not* 
part of the OpenCL 1.1 specification but just an optional implementor 
specific feature.
As a matter of fact AMD's OpenCL implementation (BTW meanwhile called 
"APP" and no longer "Stream") does not support doubles neither does 
NVidia's.
The only platform that does actually support 64-bit floats is Intels 
OpenCL SDK - and it's JIT compiler does in fact an amazing job in 
automatically vectorizing and optimizing for SSE2/3/4 registers 
depending on the used platform - but obviously it does not support any GPU.
So the funny situation ATM: if you have an AMD processor you'll need the 
Intel OpenCL SDK installed to get support for doubles within OpenCL for 
your AMD CPU and exactly zero OpenCL platfoms support 64bit floats for 
GPU's.

-Ive


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From: Ive
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 28 Jul 2011 11:11:08
Message: <4e317c0c$1@news.povray.org>
Am 27.07.2011 06:53, schrieb Ive:
> Note that support for double precision floating point types is *not*
> part of the OpenCL 1.1 specification but just an optional implementor
> specific feature.
> As a matter of fact AMD's OpenCL implementation (BTW meanwhile called
> "APP" and no longer "Stream") does not support doubles neither does
> NVidia's.
> The only platform that does actually support 64-bit floats is Intels
> OpenCL SDK - and it's JIT compiler does in fact an amazing job in
> automatically vectorizing and optimizing for SSE2/3/4 registers
> depending on the used platform - but obviously it does not support any GPU.
> So the funny situation ATM: if you have an AMD processor you'll need the
> Intel OpenCL SDK installed to get support for doubles within OpenCL for
> your AMD CPU and exactly zero OpenCL platfoms support 64bit floats for
> GPU's.
>

Just a quick update:
The brand new (from today) AMD OpenCL driver does support 64bit floats 
for GPU's. And it even works, just wrote a simple program that makes use 
of it.
But still no support for double from AMD for its own CPU's.

-Ive


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From: clipka
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 4 Aug 2011 17:13:03
Message: <4e3b0b5f$1@news.povray.org>
Am 25.07.2011 09:49, schrieb jhu:
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2346334&cid=36867000
>
> This  particular post on slashdot was interesting. Mental Ray can use the GPU
> and throws thousands of threads at it mostly due to waiting for elements in main
>   memory. How feasible is this for Povray?

With the (very recent) release of the first (GP)GPU supporting both 
64-bit floats and recursion, adapting POV-Ray for (those) GPUs might 
actually become technically feasible soon (though it still may take 
quite some time before it hits the dev team's top priorities list).

An open question would still be that of performance, which will mainly 
depend on how well the software architecture fits with the "Extreme 
SIMD" ("Single Instruction Multiple Data") hardware architecture. We 
might see a positive surprise there, though it could just as well turn 
out a big disappointment.

In any case I think the easiest-to-implement approach (and hence the 
best approach for official POV-Ray) at GPU support would be to implement 
network rendering first (it's high up on the ToDo list anyway), and then 
treat the GPU as a separate rendering node.


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From: Ive
Subject: Re: Raytracing on GPU
Date: 4 Aug 2011 17:51:18
Message: <4e3b1456$1@news.povray.org>
Am 04.08.2011 23:12, schrieb clipka:
> An open question would still be that of performance, which will mainly
> depend on how well the software architecture fits with the "Extreme
> SIMD" ("Single Instruction Multiple Data") hardware architecture. We
> might see a positive surprise there, though it could just as well turn
> out a big disappointment.
>

Guess I can answer this one as I was just curious (people from the 
luxrender project did claim a 60x speedup) and did implement a simple 
raytracer with a static scene and did follow Intel's recommendation of 
doing warmup runs before actually measuring the runtime. Here are the 
results for the raw calculation time without scene initialization:

CPU using 8 threads
fps 33.39695
2.9942 seconds

OpenCL CPU using 8 worker units
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU  950  @ 3.07GHz
2.8005 seconds

OpenCL GPU using 18 worker units
Cypress
1.7871 seconds

-Ive


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