I ported my SW-only renderer ( http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/renderer.html ) most CPU-intensive mode - the raycaster mode - to CUDA.
When I finished the Phong interpolation and Phong lighting stage, I saw that my GT240 was giving me a nice 15x speed boost, compared to my Core2Duo 2.4GHz: A 50.000 triangles "dragon" was sped up from 1.3 to 20 frames per second.
The rest of the story, and complete GPL code are available at:
http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/cudarenderer.html
UPDATE: New video with real-time interaction here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzn0Ep4tvSI
@Trix2248 The GTX 470 recently became cheaper, it's around 300$ now.. but you can get much cheaper cards on ebay the GTX 285 is also great, although it's not Fermi architecture, it's quite fast and cheap.
MrNightLifeLover 1 year ago
Man, GPGPU computing is pretty damn awesome. I have an AMD grahpics card so my only real option is directcompute or OpenCL. Sadly CUDA seems to be the most popular.
Trix2248 1 year ago