Power hungry dreamer... OpenCL?

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Power hungry dreamer... OpenCL?

Arowx(Posted 2008) [#1]
Hi I was up late last night trying to get a nice looking rendered glass cube from povray, so I had some free time to do some surfing between renders...

Anyway I ended up looking at possible ways to create 'Realtime' raytraced images and eventually found out about OpenCL 'Open Computer Language' a Khronos group initiative like OpenGL that is aimed at providing a programming platform that can run on highly parallel programs on modern GPU's!

As I was sitting there and reading I realised that the GPU on my graphics card with it's bank of vertex/shader processors was not really giving my CPU any help with it's current task, even though technically it could probably help!

It looks as though realtime game level ray tracing is still a few years off, although it sounds as though the next couple of generations of games might add some ray tracing features to their engines!

Personally I would like to write a realtime raytraced puzzle game! ;o)

So do you think OpenCL would be a good technology to have?


JoshK(Posted 2008) [#2]
I think Khronos should stick to maintaining OpenGL and discontinue OpenCL and Collada.


*(Posted 2008) [#3]
TBH I think they should continue working on it, there will come a time in the future where OpenGL and DirectX will have had thier day and something else will emerge and take thier place this could be realtime rendering or something else.

With a world that is screaming about power shortages and brown outs the main power hungry part of out computers is the graphics card, surely this will change in the future if everything is unufied onto the CPU's.