Request: GPU acceleration (CUDA and OpenCL)

That would be a dream come true.

Well... not possible... I would say maybe it's not easy to do, because programming almost everything is possible

CUDA or OpenCL would make the nodes run several times faster (same thing happened with Nuke and, for instance, its ZDefocus node), and that would be a game changer for FF and for how it is used. As I mentioned, in this project I am working right now we can't afford FF times, so we have to stick with something way less powerful

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GMM wrote: This has been requested from the beginning of times. The forum search tools finds 108 posts contemplating on GPU rendering. We need to create a subforum called "Evergreen requests".

I agree that it has been one of the most requested features considering that already most of the other popular graphics software have
already made the change to accelerated preview already some time ago, some of them already 2 or 3 years ago

108 post related to GPU only in the feature wishlist part, because there is 285 GPU related posts if you search all over the forum

104 posts in reference to OPENGL

66 posts about CUDA This is only for Nvidia graphics cards

57 posts about OPENCL This is for any brand of graphics card that would be better I think

33 posts about REALTIME PREVIEW

46 post about HARDWARE ACCELERATED

500 posts about "speed rendering" or "render speed" both give same result

If I put in the search "FF Slow" it also gives curiously 500 posts

MAYBE NOT ONLY HARDWARE RELATED ACCELERATION

I have already suggested that the hardware acceleration may not be the only way to make FF faster

Also maybe another possible solution is to separate the preview from the final render engine

Could also FF 6.0 be more faster in some way now that is 64 bit?

Although all the above are related to hardware acceleration I think that maybe is not the ONLY possible solution, and it could be possible maybe in some way made a new way to render the preview separated from the main render engine, or modify the main render engine to be faster in some way

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Grimbly wrote: Also, the ability to background render nodes in the editor might help on huge node graphs.

Oh yeah!!!

I'd say it would be helpful for it to operate on a per node basis similar to the new node setting locks so that in the end we can switch them in/out of background rendering individually, on selected nodes/node groups, and across the whole filter as a switchable and pre-selected default setting. If they were GPU rendered to top if off we'd be all set

Also, any sort of pre-allocation on the Ram or HD's that might help speed things up should be considered. In cases with very large images 10k+ on either side, it seems to allocate ram at a slow, trickled pace. That's not an insult nor is it unreasonable that it behaves this way. However, some of the jobs I would like FF to do will require 25GB+ of Ram. That's fine by me. I have 64GB so it's acceptable for FF to grab all that it needs. In these cases, I already know FF will need lots of resources before starting the render job, but FF apparently doesn't. I feel like it should. Then it can grab them all at once, and save a good bit of time right out of the gate on large projects. All those extra CPU cycles count and avoiding the whole Ram allocation handshake routine as many times as it looks like you could is bound to make a nice difference.

Personally as far as transparency goes I'd like to see some readouts for each node and some node status indicators so I can see what it's doing, what conclusion it came to, or whether it's started working yet. General things like knowing the result of math applied within math node chains could be very helpful at times. Even things as simple as giving each node a 3 color indicator (red,yellow,green) could be helpful at times. But, knowing the internals of what the node is thinking would be more helpful in most cases. This could easily fall into the debugging node/tool set I was proposing earlier, and is another reason I was proposing it to begin with

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ALZHEM wrote: But even with the 64 bits update still feels super slow on certain nodes (specially bomber

i agree that the new 64 bit does not bring much performance and FF still feel very slow, and considering that I have a slow iMac 2014 with intel core i5 650 that is not very fast, but other GPU based graphic software work very fast and well in my computer. And I do not have a very good graphic card either, so the thing is that the work of processing the image is shared by CPU and GPU

It would be very good and very helpful that FF 6 could support GPU

i have a Nvidia card but I think that OpenCL would be better than CUDA as it is for all the graphics cards and not only Nvidia

i have seen this comparison

CUDA vs OpenCL comparison

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Skybase wrote: btw I don't think iMacs have a decent GPU

I do not know the performance of the iMacs GPU but the big problem is that you can NOT change and upgrade the graphic card, you are forced to keep the one that comes from the factory.

I think that in any case if there could be a GPU acceleration in whatever way it could be, it would be surely faster than how it is now FF with only CPU based processing

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Skybase wrote: btw I don't think iMacs have a decent GPU,

Is true that regrettably the iMacs are not built with powerful graphics cards, I think that it may be because of the heat, or for keeping price low, or for both, but although of course it can not be compared to the ones of PC, is not too bad, I have not had any problem or slow down on graphics software, and I do not play games, and with the optimized software for GPU it works well

Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M is the card is inside with 1GB Ram, I wanted to be sure that is nvidia so then I can use CUDA, OpenGL and OpenCL, I do not like AMD

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SpaceRay wrote: the big problem is that you can NOT change and upgrade the graphic card, you are forced to keep the one that comes fr om the factory.

Yes is true, is very bad that apple are not selling anymore upgradable computers and you must take much care when buying the mac computer as you will not be able to change anything later

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Skybase wrote: Interesting fun fact: if you're on a Mac, you can run a GPU via thunderbolt2. You'll need to kinda hack your way to make it work but it's an excellent solution.

oh! What a surprise! i did not know that this could be possible, I only knew that you can connect an external monitor to thunderbolt

I have found what you mean but is expensive to buy it 549$ for the box to install the graphic card that you must pay apart

you tube video showing external graphic card

And on the video there is a link to wh ere you can get it and shows the price

more information about this eGPU

And what is interesting is that you can use this also for a macbook or mac mini

Thanks Skybase for the news, although Is too expensive for me