5 ms·
Since we are talking about recursive lighting and global illumination, GPUs aren't particularly well suited to this task. The major bottleneck I'd expect would
by GrouchoDarts 12y ago
Since we are talking about recursive lighting and global illumination, GPUs aren't particularly well suited to this task. The major bottleneck I'd expect would be memory coherency or interconnect speeds rather than brute compute at high enough levels of parallelism. There is probably a sweet spot of memory speeds, reliability, parallelism and processing power which they aimed for.
tl;dr: I doubt the engineers building the cluster didn't think of that.
- CyberDildonics 12y agoActually GPUs can raytrace extremely fast, and shading the hit points is basically the same as running the shaders of a game (local linear algebra). GPUs are not used much though because the video card memory is very limiting.
- Keyframe 12y agoYes and no. Primary rays cache, but secondary trash. That's why CPUs are still king for that type of rendering.
- Maken 12y agoAlso, GPUs are specially well suited for complex data structures, which can save much more rendering time than raw power.
- Keyframe 12y agoIndeed, but raytracing data structures aren't complex. Primary rays scream on GPUs, they cache amazingly. However, secondary rays for GI/FG and similar are problematic since they are trashing the cache and are branching like mad. So classic Whitted ray tracing is mad fast on GPUs, but add global illumination or similar and you've got a problem. Not to mention memory issues others have mentioned. Octane, Brigade, Keyshot are top GPU renderers these days - all very limited to what you can do with classic offline renderers which are dominant now like mental ray, vray, arnold, renderman...
- anonbanker 12y agoForgive the off-topic post, but can I email you privately? I would like to license your nickname for use in a legitimate business.
- xerophyte12932 12y agowell a current search result on the term "Cyber Dildonics" returns a lot of "sex toys" and "virtual sex" results. So if your business isn't about that, I suggest you might wanna pick a different name...
- CyberDildonics 12y agoOnly if you don't work for those scoundrels over at TeleDildonics.