"Doom" <mar### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I was curious, with the OpenCL 1.0 spec, and also with ATI/AMD releasing
> open-source code now for utilizing the GPU processing power, could it be
> possible to utilize GPU acceleration within POV-Ray?  I know a lot of POV-Ray
> is CPU intensive and utilizing the threads in the GPU would drastically speed
> up render times.

There has already been some mention in the FAQ.

The first question will be: Does OpenCL support double-precision floats? If not,
then forget it, because that's the precision POV needs. I wouldn't be surprised
if games could do fine with single-precision.

The next question would be: How to distribute the workload? Just running another
POV render thread in the GPU will hardly work.

I guess it wouldn't be worth the pain. With SSE2, the compiler will help you to
make some use of it. With OpenCL, the compiler probably cannot, so a lot of
manual changes to the code would be needed, and designing them for portability
(so that the program can still run on non-OpenCL systems) could be quite a
problem.

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