I have been pondering lately, why couldn't one use OpenCL to do the graphics processing, (I am assuming software rendering) and then dump the final image to OpenGL as a textured fullscreen quad? Or is this not possible, or a good idea?

Has anyone tried this or even shown a proof of concept of this idea?

I am also assuming OpenCL can use SLI/Xfire solutions....

Thanks!

Interesting Kryt0n, would you be willing to show some screenshots?

Thanks!

It'd be an interesting pet project though.

That's pretty much the reason; unless you want to do raytracing then the only reason right now to do such a thing is the 'because I can' factor... which at times is a good reason as long as you know what you are getting yourself into

Replacing OpenGL/Direct3D with a software one running on the GPU (while being fun) woudln't get you the same performance (although acceptable speeds should be doable). The GPU isn't really a general purpose computer, its designed to crunch OpenGL/Direct3D so you would loose any 3D specific optimization plus you would be bypassing the drivers which would also be optimizing the instructions for the specific hardware.

There's quite a few OpenCL/CUDA realtime raytracers out there that seem to get somewhat decent FPS.

With that said, it would be interesting to see if it is possible to combine traditional 3D graphics with the raytraced ones. OpenCL does have stuff that allows it to talk to OpenGL. You could do 1 normal render and overlay a lower quality but faster raytraced lighting ontop of it (just modify the normal lighting with the reflected/scattered raytraced light for example). Maybe generate realtime lightmaps that only have to be generated when the lightsource changes, so you get the quality of prebaked lighting with flexibility for things like dynamic shadows and allowing the levels to be generated at runtime without running though a 'baking lighting' phase with little in the way of slowdown (unless you move your lights a lot). Or use it to do special effects like multilevel reflections on glass.

It could be handy to look at backporting newer GPU features/extensions. Things would be slower but there's no reason you couldn't emulate something like a geometry shader on older hardware it it supports OpenCL.

It also might be possible to look at some kind of massively parallel rendering pipeline, so your game just uploads new position information to a buffer for the game objects but the GPU does most of that under the hood anyway and the bits it doesn't do would probably be the linear non parallel bits that would such on OpenCL.

A software renderer would be more portable, you could build a FPGA implementation of it example, and run it on a CPU (the future ones should have heaps of cores and probably some floating point processors like a GPU). But it's still going to be at fairly hefty performance costs. And chances are any system that runs OpenCL would be capable of running OpenGL anyway.

I wonder what the prospects are for a Direct3D OpenCL implementation, once again performance wise it would probably be better to just use an OpenGL wrapper or do a native Direct3D implementation.