GPU acceleration in Krita

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2017, Andrew Savonichev wrote:

> Hi Boudewijn,
> 
> Okay, I understand.
> I would take a couple of weeks for PoC work to have better understanding
> of changes need to be made and issues we may face.
> 
> I will get back to you when I have more to discuss.

Awesome! I'm looking forward to that!

> 
> 
>     - Andrew
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 12:01 PM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 6 Apr 2017, Andrew Savonichev wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I'd like to know what is the status of GPU usage in Krita. I know
> >> Krita can use OpenGL
> >> for rendering, but I'm thinking about offloading image processing
> >> algorithms to GPU.
> >>
> >> From my understanding, many algorithms in Krita are data parallel and
> >> operate on entire image, what
> >> makes them good candidates for offloading.
> >>
> >> Is there any directions, discussions or maybe some existing work on
> >> enabling GPU acceleration?
> >> What do you think about adding this to Krita?
> >
> > Right now, only the canvas uses the gpu. We have had two attempts to
> > use the GPU for implementing filters, once using opencl, once with
> > glsl. That code is so old and was so unripe, it's probably not even
> > useful to look at.
> >
> > Apart from filters, recomputing the layer stack on the gpu could be
> > worth-while, and writing brush engines that run on the gpu could be
> > worth-while. In both cases, the problem is getting the pixel data to
> > the gpu and back in the main memory.
> >
> > There are two possible approaches: store everything in main memory and
> > copy to the gpu memory when needed, and then when done, back, but that
> > is slow. The other approach would be to keep the entire layer stack in
> > gpu memory, but that would limit the size of images -- and people do
> > work on images that take gigabytes of memory.
> >
> > But, I am _very_ eager to see progress in this area and would
> > love to work with you to see this happen.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.krita.org, http://www.valdyas.org
> 

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.krita.org, http://www.valdyas.org