[Radiance-general] high performance graphics cards

[Chris Jessee]

Not knowing anything about GPUs I ran your response by a researcher  
at Nvidia.

 From David Luebke, research at  Nvidia.

> GPUs are a very different architecture
> from CPUs and porting anything to them is a significant effort, even
> if the problem fits the GPU model nicely. That said, there is a lot of
> research activity on using GPUs for real-time global illumination. But
> nothing out there yet approaches the goal of a straight-up C compiler
> or a GPU that runs Linux. One could certainly accelerate Radiance w/
> GPUs but that would be a full-blown research project.

Perhaps not all that practical after all. But it never hurts to ask.

Take care,

Chris Jessee




On Aug 17, 2006, at 11:56 AM, Gregory J. Ward wrote:

> Sure.  Write a C compiler for the card, port Linux to it, then  
> compile Radiance on there.  Should be a snap!
>
> -Greg
>
>
>> From: Chris Jessee <chris.jessee at kingmill.com>
>> Date: August 16, 2006 7:52:58 AM PDT
>>
>> I just saw this announcement about a new Nvidia graphics card.
>>
>> http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/10042/
>>
>> At $18,000 it is a bit out of my price range but it begs the  
>> question, would it be possible to harness the horsepower of such a  
>> card to render Radiance scenes in realtime?
>>
>> Chris Jessee
>
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