Research ATI and nVidia GPU Programming

[Jonathan Neufeld]

Research the viability of writing GPU-specific tasks on both the nVidia and ATI chipsets. These tasks are strictly computational and not (directly) visual, in other words these tasks would run exclusively on the server side GPU. The primary goal here is to determine how much we can leverage the GPU without alienating too many users with dated hardware.

Problem Set

Research should cover a general approach to solving these problems and not specific because this is a cursory research task.

• Path-finding
• Procedural terrain generation
  • General Brownian noise (simplest)
  • Porting existing Mars Tycoon algorithms
  • Ray-tracing (for line-of-sight tasks)
  • Fluid dynamics (strictly for computing water flow)
• Computing cave-ins
• Weather and climate effects

Barriers

• GPU access to data models from GPU context
• Manufacture-specific and proprietary technology
  • Between nVidia and ATI chipsets
  • Within different models of the same chipset families

[Jonathan Neufeld]

This is a core engine task