Comment by pjmlp
20 hours ago
Not necessarily, some folks advocate that with modern compute APIs we are better doing "software" rendering, but on the GPU.
By the way, this is what renders like OTOY Octane do.
20 hours ago
Not necessarily, some folks advocate that with modern compute APIs we are better doing "software" rendering, but on the GPU.
By the way, this is what renders like OTOY Octane do.
Sadly you can't access RT cores with CUDA, you need to use a graphics API like Vulkan or D3D12. You can make a fast ray tracing based renderer using pure GPU compute, but it'll still be slower than using RT cores.
And even with GPU compute, you benefit from HW acceleration with the HW texture unit.
Not everything is about ray tracing, and still it beats any software rendering, while being able to use mostly regular C++.
I would classify GPU compute based rendering as software rendering though. My original comment was written with that in mind. This is a semantic discussion though which is IMO not super important.
If you do GPU-based software rendering, I would highly advice using RT instead of raster for visibility. It's simpler and likely also faster. But HW acceleration there also beats compute, in both, although you can achieve good results without acceleration too.