Mandelbulb CUDA binary posted

[cbuchner1]

Hi, I have posted a Win32 binary that requires an nVidia CUDA capable card (G92 chip or G200 chip) such as a GTX260, nVidia 8800GT or similar cards and a fairly recent driver (CUDA 2.3 supported). It renders the fractal in real-time and morphs through powers 1 (sphere) until power 10 (mandel-ball) and all the way back.

Press the space bar to start the animation.
Press "f" to go full screen (but this requires some horse power in your card).
Hit q or ESC to exit the demo.

Read the instructions in the DOS box to get information about the other key commands.

My frame rate in the VGA (640x480) sized window is between 30 and 10 during the animation on an nVidia 9600 GSO, depending on how big the fractal currently appears. The fractal is phong shaded, but in the future I intend to apply better materials (this thing is raytraced, after all).

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=150985&view=findpost&p=953287

To download the binary (or the source code which is in a post above) you will need an nVidia forums login, which is a free sign-up and can be quickly obtained.

[cKleinhuis]

one needs a login

waiting for that welcome mail

  you should be able to upload zip files as attachments

[lycium]

i sent my registration details for the nvidia forums last weekend, still nothing at the end of this friday  :

[cbuchner1]

Have you guys since received your welcome E-mail to unlock your account? If not I can contact their administrators to let them check what's up.

I've since updated my CUDA based renderer to do proper phong shading with reflections and environment maps. Also I am faking ambient occlusion with the orbit traps, this is why the inside of this fractal appears darker.

Here's a screen shot with low fractal detail showing the render quality. It's a power -5 "mandelier" type fractal (hollow!) deliberately rendered with few iterations.



And it's interactive frame rates still on the better nVidia cards (GTX 260 and up).

I have not yet managed the fractal to cast shadows on itself. Some problem with starting ray marching from inside the bounding sphere, I presume.

[lycium]

still no email, and i can't contact anyone since you need to be logged in 

it's cool that you can now do RTRT using nvidia's own libraries! how have you found working with optix?

[cbuchner1]

i sent my registration details for the nvidia forums last weekend, still nothing at the end of this friday  :

Seems nVidia have fixed their forum E-mail problems. When you log in and click on "re-send validation E-mail" you should receive your welcome E-mail to activate your account.

[cbuchner1]

still no email, and i can't contact anyone since you need to be logged in 

it's cool that you can now do RTRT using nvidia's own libraries! how have you found working with optix?

It's quite simple to get started based on the SDK samples. It offers a low level SDK for working with rays. Based on Optix you can implement various types of renderers with different feature sets or rendering and lighting techniques. The tutorials are quite accessible.

Just a shame that it's not yet meant for the consumer level GPUs (yet!). Getting it to run there is possible, but requires some hacks.

[lycium]

thanks for letting me know, much appreciated!