irclog2html for #brlcad on 20060925

00:00.59 *** join/#brlcad ValarQ (i=vq@90-225-114-111-no122.tbcn.telia.com) [NETSPLIT VICTIM]
00:00.59 *** join/#brlcad Twingy (n=justin@c-69-250-236-111.hsd1.md.comcast.net) [NETSPLIT VICTIM]
00:01.05 *** join/#brlcad ValarQ_ (i=vq@90-225-114-111-no122.tbcn.telia.com)
00:02.08 *** join/#brlcad justin_ (n=justin@c-69-250-236-111.hsd1.md.comcast.net)
01:23.17 *** join/#brlcad digitalfredy (n=digitalf@200.71.62.161)
01:56.23 *** part/#brlcad digitalfredy (n=digitalf@200.71.62.161)
03:03.17 *** join/#brlcad danfalck (n=dan@pool-71-111-76-8.ptldor.dsl-w.verizon.net)
03:53.54 justin_ I have lay-in lugs, w00t
05:55.04 *** join/#brlcad clock_ (i=clock@84-72-94-100.dclient.hispeed.ch)
08:49.48 *** join/#brlcad clock_ (n=clock@zux221-122-143.adsl.green.ch)
12:13.33 *** join/#brlcad clock_ (n=clock@zux221-122-143.adsl.green.ch)
12:37.17 *** join/#brlcad clock__ (n=clock@zux221-122-143.adsl.green.ch)
12:51.13 Maloeran Woah. I mentionned my interest to explore raytracing hardware to Mark from Survice, and now they ask if they can provide anything I could use, even if it's as a hobby
12:53.15 Maloeran Prasad stopped idling on IRC long ago, hasn't he?
12:55.02 archivist !seen Pra5ad
12:55.09 Maloeran Erik seemed to have some vague and diffuse interest to tackle raytracing hardware. What about you, Sean?
13:23.49 Maloeran Or anyone else for that matter ;). I sure wouldn't mind exchanging a few thoughts with Prasad if he were to drop by again
13:27.30 CIA-9 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * 10brlcad/src/libbu/Makefile.am:
13:27.30 CIA-9 BRL-CAD: make the dependency on libbu.la more explicit, otherwise some versions of
13:27.30 CIA-9 BRL-CAD: automake/libtool seem to not detect the dependency causing them to attempt a
13:27.30 CIA-9 BRL-CAD: linking of htester before libbu has finished building. thx to dan o'neill for
13:27.31 CIA-9 BRL-CAD: reporting this issue (sf bug report 1563466, libbu.la missing)
13:31.37 brlcad ~seen pra5ad
13:31.51 ibot pra5ad <n=prasad@pool-151-196-137-196.balt.east.verizon.net> was last seen on IRC in channel #brlcad, 32d 13h 28m 54s ago, saying: 'pickle'.
13:32.03 brlcad heh, pickle
13:32.14 brlcad that about sums up prasad
13:33.19 brlcad Maloeran: mildly.. it really depends on the hardware and cost
13:35.13 Maloeran FPGAs first, followed by ASIC, then the world? :) VHDL/Verilog code are fairly "portable" for hardware design
13:35.36 brlcad in general if it's just an academic persuit with little chance of ever spreading through the community, then my interest dwindles.. even if the hardware and research would be cool .. :)
13:35.56 brlcad fpgas in general would be nice to play with just because they have broad applications
13:36.07 Maloeran I'm unsure about that, it must be possible to get some backing in order to pursue this beyond a toy
13:36.28 Maloeran If we solve dynamic geometry, raytracing hardware should be very appealing
13:37.28 brlcad but something tells me that the prices on them aren't going to drop anytime soon, and even if "only" costs a few grand a card (which is currently unrealistic) and gives a nice 10x boost.. and I could have gotten that same boost or better with other chips..
13:38.04 Maloeran FPGAs are just meant for quick testing and experiments I think. To get serious, we need ASIC
13:38.16 brlcad i'm not saying I doubt that it couldn't get backing beyond a toy, that doesn't make it something that will "spread through the community" though
13:38.29 brlcad getting the backing is frankly easy
13:39.05 Maloeran An ASIC design can be fully developed before any real investment, and then we could look for backing
13:39.22 brlcad i'm just questioning the merit of the approach, the overall long term utility is quite dubious
13:40.01 Maloeran I suppose the long term utility would be to make the first steps towards the disappearance of rasterization hardware
13:40.48 brlcad and I don't think that will happen anytime soon
13:40.58 brlcad they're driving the market by a couple orders of magnitude
13:41.10 brlcad more likely is that video cards will get more and more generic
13:41.22 brlcad maybe a union of the "physics card" capabilities
13:41.53 brlcad and more programmable in general, maybe eventually to the point of an fpga or some limited subset
13:42.19 Maloeran Possibly. Commercial raytracing ASIC boards are already avaiable out there, so there must be a market of some sort
13:42.36 brlcad or at least someone thinks there's a market :)
13:42.46 Maloeran The more programmable it is, the less optimized it is for raytracing specifically
13:42.53 archivist build into your stuff into tft display then
13:43.13 brlcad yep, which is why fpga's are mostly academically interesting until you can get that onto an asic
13:43.26 brlcad since you won't get the best performance
13:43.38 Maloeran Clearly so, but it's handy as a development toy
13:44.40 brlcad my main "concern" though is say that the technical implementation was all taken care of and we could fab the "best" ray-tracing specific asic today
13:45.12 brlcad someone ponies up 500k in funds to have a bunch of cards made, a massive render farm of sorts
13:46.06 Maloeran How is that a concern?
13:46.07 brlcad how does that performance compare to 500k invested into a supercomputer/cluster instead?
13:46.14 Maloeran Ah right
13:46.18 brlcad i don't think the numbers are there myself
13:46.30 brlcad and the supercomputer/cluster has vastly more applicable use
13:46.40 brlcad s/applicable/general/
13:47.01 brlcad i mean it's cool, very cool
13:47.08 brlcad but .... :)
13:47.14 Maloeran That's the main issue, definitely. The way I see it, and I could be mistaken, raytracing has not become meanstream because of lack of dynamic geometry support
13:47.31 Maloeran With superior algorithms, we can correct that, among other things
13:47.59 brlcad and in two years after you dump that 500k in, the cards may depreciate something like 80% and the cpus 50%
13:48.40 Maloeran If the design was good, it should be equally possible to build new fancy ASICs with the technology of the moment
13:49.17 brlcad while i don't think ray-tracing has become mainstream because 90% of the community doesn't need or care about the capabilities provided -- that will slowly change as more and more realism is added, but even that is a few years off
13:49.30 brlcad and in general you can always fake it much faster than you can simulate it
13:49.48 Maloeran Quite true. I don't think we would get to the point where we are ready to put ASIC boards together within 2 years anyhow
13:50.08 brlcad i mean every single effect and benefit that ray-tracing provides is generally doable on the video card with maybe the exception of subsurface scattering
13:50.10 Maloeran So this is a long-term project and/or hobby
13:50.41 brlcad and even subsurface is "close enough" with the right textures
13:51.03 Maloeran Realistic lighting, as a whole, is not possible by rasterization, but there are other advantages. Ray-tracing doesn't really care about the count of polygons
13:51.09 Maloeran You can even have curved surfaces
13:51.13 brlcad the benefit will come when all of the "hacks" can be thrown away for the considerably more simple "ray-trace" approach when the performance just isn't a concern
13:52.32 brlcad see, you say realistic lighting isn't possible, yet there are a slew of games that hack away "good enough" at reasonably good lighting, good enough for their users regardless if there's no foundation on realism
13:52.56 brlcad and they already have curved surfaces (end result, not underlying implementation) from their perspective
13:53.35 brlcad not caring about the polygon count would be a benefit
13:54.08 Maloeran Quite right. Raytracing still have some serious advantages regarding the simplicity and flexibility of the rendering, and performance being mostly independnat on the complexity of the scene
13:54.44 Maloeran It's horrible how much you have to hack things together to do something "realistic" with rasterization rendering, I played with OpenGL for a while...
13:55.17 brlcad what I could see happen would be a dedicated ray-trace pipeline getting tacked onto video cards
13:55.39 brlcad but that'd only occur IFF the ray-trace community could standardize
13:56.08 Maloeran That would only be possible with serious hardware support for space partitioning and so on, I don't think it's so likely to appear on GPUs
13:56.22 brlcad talked about that sort of an idea several times with some guys at ati a few years ago and the idea wasn't unheard of
13:58.01 Maloeran Well then... To summarize, if we were to seriously aim for a high-performance ASIC implementation, would you have any interest?
13:58.08 brlcad heh
13:59.51 brlcad possibly, I suppose it really depends on a lot of (other) issues
14:00.40 brlcad i've got a new modeling system to focus on, geometry server, run-time engine, solid model analyses, ...
14:01.42 Maloeran Understood, and it can wait a few months... I wish we could put together a little team of motivated individuals on this problem, I am personally very interested as you surely noticed
14:13.11 *** join/#brlcad clock_ (n=clock@zux221-122-143.adsl.green.ch)
18:08.42 *** join/#brlcad IriX64 (n=Who@bas3-sudbury98-1168052522.dsl.bell.ca)
18:09.30 IriX64 <PROTECTED>
18:09.44 IriX64 whats that all about?
18:10.58 IriX64 happened in overlap tool obj1-obj2.
18:11.16 IriX64 havoc database.
18:11.27 IriX64 reproducible.
18:12.09 IriX64 and don't tell *me to fix it, you own it :)
18:30.14 IriX64 castle has no overlaps.
18:32.04 IriX64 neither does cornell :)
18:33.14 Maloeran The 10k polygons castle model? Ah, I remember Twingy and I using that in our early ray-tracing experiments :)
18:34.01 Maloeran In the days where we would get 200k rays per second instead of 10 millions
18:36.13 IriX64 says its the logo castle.
18:36.44 IriX64 btw you're at a conference, are you playing hookey? :)
18:37.03 ValarQ IriX64: hey, stop spamming me
18:37.12 IriX64 haha all right.
18:37.41 IriX64 was looking for something you might like because i so enjoyed your vortex.
18:37.56 ValarQ you're filling my 0.5TB raid in my mailserver :P
18:38.09 Maloeran Ah, we came back from that conference last Friday
18:38.10 IriX64 hehe ill tar them up then ;)
18:38.19 IriX64 ah i c.
18:39.18 IriX64 half a terrabyte? whooo hooo.
18:39.46 IriX64 500gigs later of Irix^4's screen shots and what do we have :)
18:39.58 IriX64 s/6/^
18:41.25 IriX64 BTW that error is real.
18:42.59 IriX64 hahaha Gordon Lightfoot, summerside of life albumn "and the kind of gig I like the most is a rubbing the wrong girl right"
18:43.45 IriX64 :)
18:44.34 IriX64 Mouth Wash only $1.50 per bottle ;)
18:46.14 IriX64 and no i'm not implying you have halsitosis. :)
18:48.49 IriX64 star.g->shooting rays at 100.0mm this may take some time. doh tell me about it.
18:50.25 IriX64 if you're going to be a solid modelling suite *be a solid modelling suite ;)
18:51.54 IriX64 ray spacing .1m sigh.... look before you shoot :)
18:53.58 IriX64 cpu load 100% however kernel time is not even on the scale it's so low.
19:07.13 IriX64 scuse me, leaky horse, brb. :)
19:22.22 IriX64 g_lint -> 98% sheesh.
19:23.07 IriX64 cpu that is not progress.... blargh.
19:25.23 IriX64 but as they say, I mourn, I grieve, I move on.
19:25.57 IriX64 he was such hot shit toilet paper burned when it touched him :)
19:55.08 Maloeran What do you use BRL-CAD for, IriX64? Just curious
20:12.13 IriX64 testing my x-compiler.
20:12.52 IriX64 how do you test any compiler?throw lots and lots of code at her, and BrlCad qualifies as lots and lots of code :)
20:17.46 IriX64 thats why i only report bugs I come across, too busy fixing my own ;)
20:18.38 Maloeran Interesting, what compiler are you working on?
20:38.22 IriX64 working on what started life as gcc 3.3.3 but has eveolved to be cassie.exe
20:38.32 IriX64 evolved too.
20:39.13 IriX64 checking for x86-unix-linux-gnu-gcc...cassie.exe love it.
20:40.13 IriX64 left a copy called gcc.exe for configure scripts that don't honor CC.
20:42.33 IriX64 can you believe this, overlap tool is still shooting rays, what'd you guys do?
20:43.28 IriX64 this gui is the shits, i should abandon it. :)
20:44.04 IriX64 you see i need to work on something between 5 hour compile runs. :)
20:44.10 Maloeran Whine about the current raytracer, you'll like the next one ;)
20:44.25 IriX64 heh thanks for the invitation :)
20:44.49 Maloeran It might be the fastest in the world, apparently
20:45.14 IriX64 define fast, all computers wait at the same speed. :)
20:45.36 IriX64 18.2 ;)
20:48.29 IriX64 altho, you know they could use 36.4 or 44.4 and scale for backwards compatibility *shrug.
20:57.40 Maloeran Anything special about your branch of gcc? Better optimisation?
20:58.52 IriX64 arch mcpu things of that nature, and yes optimization of 3 is there.
21:02.27 IriX64 $ gcc --version
21:02.27 IriX64 gcc (GCC) 4.1.1
21:02.27 IriX64 Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
21:02.27 IriX64 This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
21:02.27 IriX64 warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
21:02.28 IriX64 IriX64@hagarsfi-f038a0 ~
21:02.30 IriX64 $ gcc -dumpmachine
21:02.32 IriX64 i686-pc-cygwin
21:02.34 IriX64 if it helps :)
21:07.58 *** join/#brlcad ibot (i=ibot@pdpc/supporter/active/TimRiker/bot/apt)
21:07.58 *** topic/#brlcad is http://brlcad.org/ || BRL-CAD is an open source solid modeling software suite || Developers needed! Read the HACKING file for details on getting involved
21:14.44 IriX64 lf i post my ld --help screen, you'll.... :)
21:24.25 IriX64 www.pastebin.com Mario D'Ulisse
21:27.13 IriX64 you know overlap tool needs some work scuse me.
22:28.41 *** mode/#brlcad [+b %IriX64!*@*.dsl.bell.ca] by brlcad
22:29.23 brlcad you'd think he'd learn
22:33.12 dtidrow_work lol
22:46.37 ``Erik heh
23:37.47 Twingy took you long enough
23:42.11 brlcad it's not a full ban, just stole his voice
23:46.27 dtidrow_work heh

Generated by irclog2html.pl by Jeff Waugh - find it at freshmeat.net! Modified by Tim Riker to work with blootbot logs, split per channel, etc.