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I don't know if it's a silly idea or not, but i post it anyway :)

Considering all the media coverage this forum had, considering that the latest kind of "3D Fractal" was "invented here (c)(r)(tm)", and considering that we certainly have the most CPU intensive (and "embarassingly parallel") hobby.

What about trying to have a sponsoring by Intel ?

- An acces to some kind of rendering farm is probably a wet dream ... but, why not :
- a sponsoring that can easily pay the forum hosting (and provide more space for the gallery hosting (terabyte  hosting to host high resolution picture ?)
- and/or prizes for the Fractal forum contest. Hardware, or licences for Intel fortran/C/C++ libraries and compiler.

nvidia would also be a candidate :D

havent thought about it, if anyone has a contact, it can be forwarded to me ... i would like to keep the domain in my ownership, but hosting is really getting a problem in a year or two ....

and AMD/ATI of course.

But i like Intel more than AMD, and Intel have much more sponsoring/educational/incentive/research/... programs than AMD, afaik.

About NVidia, well, ... they could start with a free CUDA/OpenCL training for <insert your favorite fractal program>'s coder :)
Most fractal program would hugely benefit of the power of GPGPU (as they are massively parallel) and i'll happily buy a NVidia Fermi card instead of an octocore-cpu ... if i could choose :)

Great idea, but I have to be the devil's advocate and ask, what would the sponsor get out of it?  I'm sure that's the first question they'll ask.

ibm has supported mandelbrot
they get out of it to be associated with new creative development of state of the art computer generated methods
and they can claim to render those beasts on their hardware efficently

i personally am a bit disappointed that we found 3d fractals because rendering time is like back in the 80s although we have tremendous hardware

Good points!

To approach a company we should have a carefully and professionally written letter along with a few carefully selected artistically and technically impressive images rendered on that company's hardware.  Images that the company might envision their logo on top of in promotional materials.

Preferably the same image rendered on different hardware with a "render time comparison" to prove the worth of said hardware to customers  O0

and the best benefit for us would be we could get rid of the adsense ads :D

Imagine what we'll find in another ten years, when compute power has gone through another five or ten doublings.

Have you ever tried the Pixelbender script on a decent GPU? We're talking seconds of rendering time here, not minutes/hours I am working on getting some of buddhi's Mandelbulber GPU accelerated. It's quite a challenge though.

Also there are some ideas in the forums that could speed up the DE a lot, such as sphere tracing. Instead of applying distance estimates to one ray only, you can apply it to entire ray bundles.

Christian

yes, i love the pixelbender skript, but i do not like the floating points :D