"clipka" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "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.


Thank you for the input.  All of it makes sense.  From my knowledge, most
current GPU's do support double precision floats, however, not nearly at the
speed as single precision, as there isn't the need in graphics today.

I know some cards to exist that are designed more for math / calcuations and not
graphics, but i do not know much about those workstation cards, and/or what all
they do support.

Thanks again for the quick input!  It answered my curiosity of the day.

-Mark

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