A Big Push For More OpenCL Hardware Acceleration With GEGL / GIMP

Dutch software firm StreamComputing has launched an educational project aiming to get more developers using OpenCL and as part of this initiative they will try to port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.

GEGL, the Generic Graphics Library, has been long in development as a replacement for The GIMP's core for offering non-destructive editing, support for higher bit depths, and other functionality. GIMP has begun utilizing GEGL while in the upcoming GIMP 2.10 release they look to fully utilize GEGL. Aside from GIMP, GNOME Photos and other applications are interested in GEGL as well.

There has already been some work on providing OpenCL acceleration for imaging operations with GEGL, but now StreamComputing is tossing their weight into the effort. They look to speed up GEGL and so far already have seven participants working on the project.

Details on this project were posted to the GIMP blog. The OpenCL GEGL work is currently being done via this GitHub repository. They are doing benchmarking and if it's automated enough and suitable for my benchmarking requirements, I can look at using it for some OpenCL benchmarks in the future.