OpenCL or OpenMP for Streaming in a Game Engine

Engines and Middleware Programming

Started by EMascheG February 14, 2013 10:59 PM

2 comments, last by Helicobster 11 years, 1 month ago

EMascheG

1,388

Author

February 14, 2013 10:59 PM

Hi GameDev.

I am in the process of my Game Engine, I want implement a system of streaming to create big maps or terrain so i need a system of stream to avoid overloading of memory,cpu.

For example: my terrain will be the size of 100x100km or more. and more the entities,objects,etc will need very powerfull machine to run.

I need a streaming system to avoid this. and see the more used, easy to learn is OpenCL and OpenMP(Another think is, i using OpenCL to my physics system with Bullet Engine).

So what recommend me OpenCL or OpenMP and can tell me about tips,reviews,experience,problems,Who is more difficult?. using this streaming languages ,Another think that round my head is about OpenCL is can work with CPU?. so can use that too so for example: a person don´t have a very good GPU so can use the CPU.

Also don´t there a OpenCL SDK or IDE official of Khronos Group only the company Intel,IBM,Nvidia,AMD have a SDK(Here can see more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#OpenCL-conformant_products) then exits a tools or something to programming with OpenCL and my same code can use the AMD,Nvidia Cards and CPU, if don´t exits can programming in the Nvidia SDK(Because i have Card Nvidia) and later my code can use the AMD card or need modify in SDK of AMD, later pass to have SDK of IBM to use in CPU, But using this process i complicating things and for game engine is no usefull.

Soo with OpenMP don´t have this type of problem if can´t use OpenCL.

Thanks for looking more to help me, Sorry if i wrong writing, I still learning English and don´t write very well.

C0lumbo

4,415

February 15, 2013 11:14 AM

I think you're thinking about using the wrong tools to solve your problem.

If I understand correctly you need to dynamically load (stream) your terrain and entity data because it's too big to fit all in memory at once. But you want this loading to be done in the background so that it doesn't interfere with the main thread which is busy updating and rendering your game. This problem is commonly solved by creating a single load thread, the process for doing this is language and platform specific, but for Windows C++, you might look at the CreateThread function, for many other platforms, there's POSIX threads.

Now, I don't have a deep understanding of OpenCL and OpenMP, but I believe these are tools to help spawn and manage many, many threads on either the CPU or GPU. This can be great if you have a problem you can divide and conquer, e.g. image processing or something. But in the case of loading resources, you actually really want to have just a single thread doing the loading, because the Harddrive (or DVD) is most efficient when reading linearly and requesting many reads from many different locations concurrently isn't going to make loading faster, and may well make it slower.

So, to summarize, OpenCL and OpenMP are not appropriate tools for implementing streaming (in the sense of loading data in the background), you should look at using whatever thread library is supported on your language and OS and manage the threads more directly.

(Apologies if I misunderstood the question though)

Rapture - World Conquest

EMascheG

1,388

Author

February 16, 2013 03:19 PM

Thx to reply now i understand better, So only i need library or system load in the background for example using the Harddisk(HDD) and the memory more render the more closers.

Helicobster

231

March 08, 2013 10:53 PM

Now, I don't have a deep understanding of OpenCL and OpenMP, but I believe these are tools to help spawn and manage many, many threads on either the CPU or GPU.

OpenCL isn't designed for task parallelism, but OpenMP is actually pretty well suited to forking off a single thread at a time.

And compared to OpenCL, it's very easy to use OpenMP in an existing C++ project.

#pragma omp task would be a good place to start.

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