Indigo 4 Lets You Have Full Graphics Rendering Over OpenCL

[Ardje]

For AMD i think more and more users under linux will use the open source drivers but that's not your professional customers.
If your an phoronix reader then i think you should be pretty up to date with the open source drivers and regular users.
That said, great work.

I think the whole opensource driver thing with ATI started when professional users wanted to have stable drivers (I think we speak 10 years ago). As an admin I would rather have all my systems use opensource drivers as they usually do not lag behind your distro of choice.
I assume indigo also can use network rendering, so if you have a network of AMD gpu's you better want them to be maintainable.
Maybe AMDGPU will bring a big change, but currently it only works without hassle on new cards.
So I don't think that professional users really care if it is open or closed, they care if it works.
Gamers otoh want to milk out the last fps they can squeeze out of their hardware.
As for linux as a platform for professional users... I have no idea. But big render farms usually run linux in the farm.

[Nille_kungen]

We haven't tried it with the opensource drivers, sorry, but hopefully someone will give it a spin! We need our linux boxen stable for development purposes, and I understand the opensource drivers are a little less developed / less likely to be used by professional customers. Drivers are absolutely crucial for GPU compute applications, so I imagine there could be very large differences.

Well for PTS benchmark open drivers would make sense and for Intel on linux there's only one driver and it's open source.
For AMD i think more and more users under linux will use the open source drivers but that's not your professional customers.
If your an phoronix reader then i think you should be pretty up to date with the open source drivers and regular users.
That said, great work.

[juno]

"Just another OpenCL renderer" - are there really so many of these around at the moment? Most GPU renderers tend to be for CUDA (I've heard that Cycles also prefers to use CUDA), and they seem to have a Pascal compatibility problem at the moment...

I didn't mean to be offensive in this sentence. English is not my mother tongue, so wording isn't always perfect. Also, you are quoting this out of context.
I didn't mean to say there are plenty and bringing up one more is a bad thing. But there is a difference between how Michael wrote it and suggested this is something completely new and something new that tries to make something better than already existing software.

BTW: Indigo isn't that new, anyways, is it? But the GPGPU part is? OK, the version number says it all
I associate the name with Wings3D, which was the first 3D software I used when I was a little kid... but I don't really know if there is a connection or not...

[lycium]

Nille_kungen I don't blame you at all for being skeptical hearing it from us, there's a whole lot of hot air in the rendering engine market! If it makes any difference, I used to work on LuxRender (with the original author, Radiance, who later started Octane Render) and am just some normal programmer guy in a tiny 3-man company, not a Megacorp PR drone or something Regardless, I try to be quantitative and specific, cite sources and don't die from criticism etc.

We haven't tried it with the opensource drivers, sorry, but hopefully someone will give it a spin! We need our linux boxen stable for development purposes, and I understand the opensource drivers are a little less developed / less likely to be used by professional customers. Drivers are absolutely crucial for GPU compute applications, so I imagine there could be very large differences.

[Nille_kungen]

lycium thanks for the filling in the gaps.
The quality on the Indigo does look better and smaller sizes too it seems but i am one of those that's a bit skeptical when it comes from the developers them selves (PR) but this seems like a smaller project so i don't think it's much PR involved.
Great work and i really hope that the benchmarks turns out to be useful with PTS and that we get a new good OpenCL (CUDA) benchmark when testing hardware and drivers.
Does it work good with the open source drivers from AMD and Intel?

[lycium]

Hi guys, I'm the guy at Glare who contacted Michael, one of two Indigo engine devs (and former LuxRender dev).

I probably should have been clearer in my mail to him what Indigo is; as some of you have (rather harshly!) pointed out, it's not an OpenGL render engine, but an unbiased, physically-based renderer.

"Just another OpenCL renderer" - are there really so many of these around at the moment? Most GPU renderers tend to be for CUDA (I've heard that Cycles also prefers to use CUDA), and they seem to have a Pascal compatibility problem at the moment...

Each rendering engine has its pros and cons, and with Indigo image quality gets top priority. Current comparisons against Lux and Cycles seem to indicate that it's also a good deal faster / lower noise for the same time, here are some examples from Blender users (I tried to attach but lack permissions, so one is from my dropbox):

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3038174/opencl%20indigo%20vs%20cycles.jpg

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/download/file.php?id=20911&mode=view

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=135568&f=1#p135568

I'm a big fan / long time lurker of Phoronix and Linux is an excellent performer for Indigo, so as I offered to Michael, if you guys have any questions about GPU ray tracing or physically-based rendering in general, please feel free to ask! It doesn't have to be about Indigo in particular of course, and I try to be objective as possible

We're announcing a new benchmark soon, similar to LuxMark, with the hope of making it useful to review sites (which is the reason I contacted Michael). If you'd like an early look at it (we'll add online results database still), you can grab it from http://indigorenderer.com/indigobench

[zeealpal]

And since the GPU version has more limitations and missing features than the GPU version (Nothing against the Indigo team, GPU render engines are hard) it really doesn't differentiate itself from LuxRender, whose GPU mode has had: "...first renderers to achieve 100% GPU rendering over OpenCL..." for a while.

That is after all what your LuxMark benchmark is doing...

[juno]

Agreed, it is just another OpenCL renderer like Cycles or Luxrender. This text is indeed misleading and I clicked because of that, so maybe it just served it's purpose...

[emblemparade]

Michael, your opening sentence is going to spread confusion about this project. It is not "implementing full OpenGL for graphics over OpenCL". It is a 3D renderer for modeling software: *static* scenes, not real-time, and definitely not interactive gaming. The advantage that Indigo claims here is that by using OpenCL and CUDA they have been able to render scenes faster than before, which sounds about right. But none of this has anything to do with OpenGL.

[log0]

The first sentence is totally misleading.

This is not about implementing OpenGL using some other API, but simply a (non real-time) OpenCL renderer