Displacement tests

[Diogo Moita]

Hello guys, how are you?
I was taking a look at old displacement tests Radiance have done with luxrender when I realized that there´s no GPU renderer capable of displacement map. No one. Does anybody knows why GPU doesn´t support displacement?

[radiance]

because they are all young and it takes time to develop such things.
there's also no existing papers about it, and it's quite a difficult thing to adapt to a gpu.

Radiance

[Diogo Moita]

I see. But, in your opinion, do you think it´s possible?

[vanlicht]

It is possible for ATI's card,
they have micro-displacement tech which is practical and not just theory,
applied in another GPU application.

But not on NVidia's card as I know of it...maybe DX11 will change something?

[Chris]

Your are talkling about Hardware Tesselation. Hardware tesselation is a feature wich works with the new Directx 11 api. Directx 11 was first available with Ati cards and are now available with the new Nvidia cards aswell.
The Cuda api have no support for hardware tesselation, and will probaly not have it for a long time if ever.
One render engine with hardware tesselation is Machstudio Pro wich is a biased directx render engine and not a unbiased engine like Octane.

Cheers.

Chris

[radiance]

It is possible for ATI's card,
they have micro-displacement tech which is practical and not just theory,
applied in another GPU application.

But not on NVidia's card as I know of it...maybe DX11 will change something?

these are fixed function pipeline based, eg opengl/directX for games,
the actual hardware is not exposed to the programming interface we use, so we can't use it.

also raytracers work entirely differently so it's not as easy to apply.

Radiance

[radiance]

Your are talkling about Hardware Tesselation. Hardware tesselation is a function wich works with the new Directx 11 api. Directx 11 was first available with Ati cards and are now available with the new Nvidia cards aswell.
The Cuda api have no support for hardware tesselation, and will probaly not have it for a long time if ever.
One render engine with hardware tesselation is Machstudio Pro wich is a biased directx render engine and not a unbiased engine like Octane.

Cheers.

Chris

you beat me to it

Radiance

[Chris]

Radiance:

Perhaps OpenCL will have support for hardware tesselation sometimes in the future when its mature enough. Who knows, just my thoughts.

Chris

[vanlicht]

Yes, I think Chris' description is much more precise and correct.

[Diogo Moita]

Good explanation! Although these are not so good news hehehe I´ve seen the displacement video of Mach Studio Pro, I forgot that was on the GPU. The guys from MotivaCG are preparing something very similar on COLIMO, but they use CUDA! Maybe a light at the end of the tunel?