The last week and weekend has been really busy with guests staying at our house so unfortunately not much done in the way of coding. Still it's always good to catch up with old friends. You know you are getting old when you realize that you have had some of your workshop tools and friends longer than not having them....
If you have sent an email in the last week and have not received a reply please be patient I do try and answer each one.
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
COCR, markov-chains and QED*
Although ray-tracing is fun :) it is not my only CUDA project at the moment. The first one I did was entitled "cocr" - I really have to come up with a better naming convention... It was my cuda competition entry and was a bit of a rushed job only having obtained a cuda capable graphics card a few days before the deadline.
I've held off posting many details of it here until judging was finished. But as there doesnt seem to be any news I think I can safely assume it didn't place anywhere (pity as the prizes were rather yummy for a developer). Cocr is an implementation of a very simple template matching ocr system.
I've held off posting many details of it here until judging was finished. But as there doesnt seem to be any news I think I can safely assume it didn't place anywhere (pity as the prizes were rather yummy for a developer). Cocr is an implementation of a very simple template matching ocr system.
Friday, 12 September 2008
New Downloads
Please visit the cudart downloads link to get the *hopefully* bug fixed versions of cudart for CUDA v1.1 and v2.0. The v2.0 one also includes the viewport bug fix.
Although the previous versions worked fine on the majority of systems there were issues with any CUDA 2.0 toolkit install / new forceware drivers. Hopefully these are now sorted out. Please make sure you extract all the files from the zips before you run the .exe's.
Thanks again to Audun for his help on this one. Its nice to see that there are still people out there who know how to use a debugger in native mode.
Although the previous versions worked fine on the majority of systems there were issues with any CUDA 2.0 toolkit install / new forceware drivers. Hopefully these are now sorted out. Please make sure you extract all the files from the zips before you run the .exe's.
Thanks again to Audun for his help on this one. Its nice to see that there are still people out there who know how to use a debugger in native mode.
Thursday, 11 September 2008
Bug Fixes
While working on my much talked about acceleration structure I have kept noticing artifacts and distortions as soon as it is applied to the scene. This has had me rather stumped for two days as the code / raw output seemed correct. Finally it occured to me to check my scene code and in particular my viewport code.
As it turns out my viewport code has been flawed since I converted from purely triangles to include spheres. Here is a new screenshot showing the improvement in the image quality now that its been fixed. You will also notice that you can clearly see the spiral reflected in the sphere as well as the red light that is behind the viewer (have to look closely for this one). The image is scaled down from the original size in order to save a bit of bandwith - lots of traffic from nvidia site :)
[caption id="attachment_274" align="alignnone" width="403" caption="After bug fix of viewport code"]
[/caption]
I am yet to fix the downloadable version (downloads section) but will do so tonight.
As it turns out my viewport code has been flawed since I converted from purely triangles to include spheres. Here is a new screenshot showing the improvement in the image quality now that its been fixed. You will also notice that you can clearly see the spiral reflected in the sphere as well as the red light that is behind the viewer (have to look closely for this one). The image is scaled down from the original size in order to save a bit of bandwith - lots of traffic from nvidia site :)
[caption id="attachment_274" align="alignnone" width="403" caption="After bug fix of viewport code"]
[/caption]I am yet to fix the downloadable version (downloads section) but will do so tonight.
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
More links working again...
I seem to have broken all the "more" links on the posts by enabling the permalink feature yesterday. I've set it back to the way it was until I can work out why this happened. Or rather until Rich tells me what I broke :p
Apologies if you couldn't read some posts or download yesterday.
Apologies if you couldn't read some posts or download yesterday.
Acceleration of ray tracers on CUDA 1.1 devices
As those of you who follow the blog will know, I have been working on an acceleration mechanism for my raytracer over the past week.
As it turns out converting my large stack of A4 sheets of diagrams and equations into proper code has not been as easy as I had hoped. With about a third of it implemented I am getting no speed up what so ever on cudart. In fact I have lost about 2fps. This is largely to be expected as I am pretty much hitting the limits of what my card can do.
As it turns out converting my large stack of A4 sheets of diagrams and equations into proper code has not been as easy as I had hoped. With about a third of it implemented I am getting no speed up what so ever on cudart. In fact I have lost about 2fps. This is largely to be expected as I am pretty much hitting the limits of what my card can do.
Monday, 8 September 2008
Cudart on Nvidia's CUDA page
After noticing a bit of a spike in traffic to the webserver, I see that Nvidia added cudart to the CUDA page on their site.
Although the application is fairly small the videos are quite big so I'm hoping my allocated bandwith will be enough.
Almost inevitably there has been a reported problem with the application. Thanks to Audun who posted a comment. My development PC (AMD 4400 with windows XP) is currently running a 8800GT with 512mb and a 7800GTX with a monitor attached. All calculations are done on the 8800GT and the display is done on the 7800GTX. Initially I thought that this was the problem as most people run their displays on the same card. A quick fiddle around and monitor swapping over has ruled this out - its working perfectly.
Although the application is fairly small the videos are quite big so I'm hoping my allocated bandwith will be enough.
Almost inevitably there has been a reported problem with the application. Thanks to Audun who posted a comment. My development PC (AMD 4400 with windows XP) is currently running a 8800GT with 512mb and a 7800GTX with a monitor attached. All calculations are done on the 8800GT and the display is done on the 7800GTX. Initially I thought that this was the problem as most people run their displays on the same card. A quick fiddle around and monitor swapping over has ruled this out - its working perfectly.
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