On Jan 11, 2008 5:05 PM, Ferran Basora <fcsonline@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Nowadays, I think that all people that works with GIMP have a 3D Graphic
> card. It could be possible to integrate some of GEGL operations with the
> OpenGL library and delegate a part of work to be faster?
> For example, rotate, transform, blur, mask operations.
Some operations of GEGL can potentially be accelerated by the means of
a GPU. Accelerating things directly with OpenGL is not possible since
OpenGL gives no warranties about the precision of the resulting
rendering (it just has to "look good enough"). GEGL on the other hand
aims for high precision rather than performance in it's output. It
might be viable at some point in the future to add fast paths to GEGL
that use GLSL or similar fragment shaders to do some of the work.
One of the main issues with accelerating these things with a GPU is
that moving data from the system memory to the graphics memory and
back is slow. Another problem is that you restrict the portability of
the software severely. Thus you will often end up with a problem if
some of your operations are GPU accelerated and some are not, the net
effect might be that the end result is slower than a pure software
implementation.
The only way I see it as viable to add usch acceleration to GEGL is to
add optional fast paths in addition to the reference code already
existing in C. This will be the same route GEGL will go down in
accepting 8bit, 16bit, MMX, SSE and similar optimizations as well,
they will be in addition to the sofware based floating point
operations and it shall be possible to disable their use if they do
not achieve sufficient precision.
Another thing that GEGL currently is lacking but it will most
certainly get support for before GPU based acceleration is proprly
considered is other forms of parallellziation, two, four, eight and
eighty cpu cores are things that seems to become more and more wide
spread.
/Øyvind K.
--
«The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed»
-- William Gibson
http://pippin.gimp.org/ http://ffii.org/
_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer
