This kernel is compiled with AVX2, FMA3, and BMI compiler flags. At the moment only Intel Haswell benefits from this, but future AMD CPUs will have these instructions as well.
Makes rendering on Haswell CPUs a few percent faster, only benchmarked with clang on OS X though.
Part of my GSoC 2014.
* AVX is available on Intel Sandy Bridge and newer and AMD Bulldozer and newer.
* We don't use dedicated AVX intrinsics yet, but gcc auto vectorization gives a 3% performance improvement for Caminandes. Tested on an i5-3570, Linux x64.
* No change for Windows yet, MSVC 2008 does not support AVX.
Reviewed by: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D216
This actually works somewhat now, although viewport rendering is broken and any
kind of network error or connection failure will kill Blender.
* Experimental WITH_CYCLES_NETWORK cmake option
* Networked Device is shown as an option next to CPU and GPU Compute
* Various updates to work with the latest Cycles code
* Locks and thread safety for RPC calls and tiles
* Refactored pointer mapping code
* Fix error in CPU brand string retrieval code
This includes work by Doug Gale, Martijn Berger and Brecht Van Lommel.
Reviewers: brecht
Differential Revision: http://developer.blender.org/D36
This is mostly work towards enabling the __KERNEL_SSE__ option to start using
SIMD operations for vector math operations. This 4.1 kernel performes about 8%
faster with that option but overall is still slower than without the option.
WITH_CYCLES_OPTIMIZED_KERNEL_SSE41 is the cmake flag for testing this kernel.
Alignment of int3, int4, float3, float4 to 16 bytes seems to give a slight 1-2%
speedup on tested systems with the current kernel already, so is enabled now.
* 32 bit GCC builds now have the SSE BVH optimizations turned off, but still
compile with SSE flags for better performance.
* White color when rendering on Windows seems to have been unrelated to SSE,
rather it was a graphics driver not supporting half float textures, added a
check for that now.
There is some sort of problem with the SSE2 code path, but I couldn't find
the cause, maybe a compiler bug due to the large amount of inlining? For
now I've disabled SSE2 optimizatons in 32 bit GCC builds.