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

[caligula]

Nice! Maybe this will speed up GIMP development quite a bit. To me it seems that the graphics routines could be made quite generic in a way that makes them usable in other applications too. Besides the same algorithms should be directly applicable in all three (darktable, inkscape, gimp). Would sound really terrible if each graphics application would need its own OpenCL kernels.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Great news and they are the right team to do it. If not them it would take another 3 years to get GIMP 3.0 out the door.

[linuxforall]

OpenCL has been implemented in Darktable long while back and works fine on both my Arch and Ubuntu installations as long as I have the right nvidia drivers installed and in Ubuntu nvidia-modprobe installed. Good to see it making its way into GIMP which will give it a much needed speed boost on filters etc.

[Dick Palmer]

Nice! Maybe this will speed up GIMP development quite a bit. To me it seems that the graphics routines could be made quite generic in a way that makes them usable in other applications too. Besides the same algorithms should be directly applicable in all three (darktable, inkscape, gimp). Would sound really terrible if each graphics application would need its own OpenCL kernels.

Then you're in luck! "Generic" is exactly what the GEGL project stands for... quite literally... the first two letters to be precise
GEGL - the GEneric Graphics Library

[liam]

Maybe ditch GIMP and combine efforts with Blender. Blender is fast

Even if you don't use the gimp, it's two main libraries (gegl and babl) are very, very valuable, and are used in other projects.
Making their functions, many of which are amenable to parallelism, faster is important.

[StreamComputing]

Hey Vincent, if any of the new OpenCL operations for GEGL/GIMP can be done in an automated manner where I could get it testing via Phoronix-Test-Suite, I'd love to help out and run plenty of benchmarks when the time is right on many GPUs/drivers. Feel freee to message me anytime at michael at phoronix.com. Thanks!

Yes, we create filters that are optimised for a selected list of architectures. Adel Johar has made a GEGL-wrapper, which could be extended for this goal. I'll email you later this month.

[caligula]

Then you're in luck! "Generic" is exactly what the GEGL project stands for... quite literally... the first two letters to be precise
GEGL - the GEneric Graphics Library

So why can't GIMP use the darktable's already implemented OpenCL kernels? Are they implemented in a way that's hostile towards GIMP ?

[prokoudine]

Great news and they are the right team to do it. If not them it would take another 3 years to get GIMP 3.0 out the door.

OpenCL has nothing to do with objectives of either GIMP 2.10 or GIMP 3.0.

[TheLexMachine]

So why can't GIMP use the darktable's already implemented OpenCL kernels? Are they implemented in a way that's hostile towards GIMP ?

darktable uses OpenCL to accelerate specific processes, so the code and implementation are different than GEGL, which is more of a "do-it-all" library, that any program can access to have image processing/editing functions and eventually, OpenCL accelerated versions of those. Back in the day, darktable was using GEGL, but they dropped it because it didn't work well at the time, so they moved on to trying to get OpenCL acceleration of darktable processes. Once GEGL (and OpenCL implementation in Linux) progresses to the point where it's fully-functional, darktable will move back to GEGL and use GIMP for handling all image editing and processing functions with hardware accelerated capabilities while darktable becomes nothing more than a workflow interface.

[StreamComputing]

Which open source project should be ported to OpenCL next? You can submit your idea here: https://github.com/OpenCL/OpenCL_Por...rojects_Voting