Independent Study: Week 3

Tried Cuda, hated it. Way too much work to do the same thing as OpenCL.

I'm sticking to the mentality that I don't know OpenCL well enough to be concerned about the framerates I'm getting. But I've learned a LOT in the last few days about how it works.

I've now got dynamic scene support, so I can add planes and spheres at will (excuse the overlap, I haven't implemented depth yet):

Update: (3/26/2012 @ 8:05 PM)

I got accurate depth and intersections done, the following is rendering surface normals at the points of intersection:

Update: (3/26/2012 @ 11:37 PM)

Phong shading integrated successfully:

Independent Study: Week 2

Red Dot:

Still a little quirky, lots of hard-coded stuff (namely the geometry in the world), but it's working!

Annnnnnd I'm probably going to have to start over with CUDA because of that performance thing I was complaining about. But it's not a sure thing yet.

Independent Study: Week 1

Quick update. I've got OpenCL interfacing with OpenGL and drawing a real nice gradient:

I'd be happier if the framerate was higher however. 800 FPS might sound great, but I know that's going to plummet when I actually start doing stuff in the OpenCL kernel code. Right now it's doing some floating point arithmetic and that's it. Also a similar procedural gradient as a shader in OpenGL would probably be hitting 3000 FPS on my test system so I'm not sure what's up there either. Definitely going to have to work on it.

Independent Study

So I'm running out of courses that I'm required to take at RIT for my software engineering degree, and faster than I'm running out of required course blocks that I have to fill in order to actually graduate. So I'm doing an independent study. I've decided that writing a ton isn't for me, so I'm keeping these brief from now on until some miraculous day comes around where people want to actually read what I'm typing. This was after all just for my own records...

So yeah, independent study. I'm doing Photon Mapping on the GPU with a focus on real-time results. My laptop's a beast for it's age (Quadcore i7, GeForce 285M GTX video card) so I should be able to get some power out of it. I'm going to use OpenCL I think, but I might change my mind in the next few days and move to CUDA instead. Other than that there's not much to say right now. I'll throw up another post with content next hopefully.