POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Is there any plan for using CUDA cores for rendering? Server Time
28 Mar 2024 08:23:35 EDT (-0400)
  Is there any plan for using CUDA cores for rendering? (Message 1 to 3 of 3)  
From: Kima
Subject: Is there any plan for using CUDA cores for rendering?
Date: 5 May 2020 13:35:00
Message: <web.5eb1a2dad6e91b7aecc0fada0@news.povray.org>
There are several discussions here in this board on using CUDA cores in POVRAY
back in 2006-2007.

I understand that most of rendering tasks are too complicated for GPU cores, and
fit the CPU capability. However, I was unable to find any recent discussion on
this matter. In the last 10 years, the GPU technology and its interfacing
software have been massively advanced.

I wonder if a GPU-powered POVRAY (using CUDA cores for a part of the
calculations) is on the roadmap OR the difference does not justify the effort?


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From: Chris Cason
Subject: Re: Is there any plan for using CUDA cores for rendering?
Date: 5 May 2020 20:09:16
Message: <5eb2002c@news.povray.org>
On 6/05/2020 03:31, Kima wrote:
> I understand that most of rendering tasks are too complicated for GPU cores, and
> fit the CPU capability. However, I was unable to find any recent discussion on
> this matter. In the last 10 years, the GPU technology and its interfacing
> software have been massively advanced.

GPU's have improved somewhat but are still hampered by the poor
precision of their floating-point arithmetic (I don't know of any
consumer devices that do anything better than 64-bit). Given that
POV-Ray has to deal with floating-point precision issues even with
80-bit FPU's I feel that using GPU's at the current technology level
would be a step backwards in quality.

There may be some scope to offloading some bounding box calculations to
GPU's if we modified the code sufficiently that we could batch thousands
of them at once, however that would be a significant change and would
still not relieve the native FPU of the bulk of the work.

-- Chris


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From: Alain Martel
Subject: Re: Is there any plan for using CUDA cores for rendering?
Date: 6 May 2020 11:30:11
Message: <5eb2d803@news.povray.org>
Le 2020-05-05 à 13:31, Kima a écrit :
> There are several discussions here in this board on using CUDA cores in POVRAY
> back in 2006-2007.
> 
> I understand that most of rendering tasks are too complicated for GPU cores, and
> fit the CPU capability. However, I was unable to find any recent discussion on
> this matter. In the last 10 years, the GPU technology and its interfacing
> software have been massively advanced.
> 
> I wonder if a GPU-powered POVRAY (using CUDA cores for a part of the
> calculations) is on the roadmap OR the difference does not justify the effort?
> 
> 

The main issue is : Can the GPU handle different processes on different 
cores ? Can the GPU handle fundamentally different geometry at the same 
time ?

The GPU works great when it have only triangles or only polys to 
evaluate. Not so great when it need to contend with mixed primitives.


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