opencl

I'm starting to learn some of what needs to be done to use OpenCL by watching some podcasts here. OpenCL stands for Open Computing Language. It is a software development framework to aid doing general purpose graphics processor computing. So when applied in a program, some work is moved away from the cpu over to the graphics board across a bus. Even though moving data back and forth between the cpu and gpu is slow relative to the number of instructions a cpu could have executed on data had it not been moved, the speed of newer graphics boards with certain operations, like doing many simultaneous floating point calculations, can make the operation result in a net improvement in performance.

The Khronos group defines the OpenCL specifications. They also handle OpenGL. According to web articles both Nvidia and ATI now support OpenCL in many of their graphics boards. However I've seen some people mention problems trying to build and then get samples of the library to work with their graphics cards.

Surface Shader update on Vimeo

PQ Houdini posted an update to the surface shader of a brick. The update corrects some flaws with the previous shader.