Re: Misc: Applications of small floating point formats.

On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 03:56:35 -0500, BGB wrote:
 

For batch rendering, it doesn't really need to be efficient though.

 Of course it does. Ray-traced renderers can compute hundreds or thousands
of rays per pixel, taking anywhere from minutes to hours per frame. This
is how you produce those cinema-quality 4K (or even 8K) frames. Anything
that can shave a little bit off the time for a single ray computation can
very quickly add up.
 

General strategy would be to setup a context, render to the context, and
then fetch the rendered image using glReadPixels or similar.
>
The "glReadPixels()" function is not exactly new...

 Almost verging on useless, in my (albeit limited) tests. OpenGL, Vulkan
and the like are targeted towards on-screen rendering, and that’s what you
should stick to using them for.
 Don’t confuse this with the fact that programmable GPUs are adaptable to
run SIMD-oriented compute APIs like OpenCL/SYCL (and their proprietary
rivals), and that these are commonly used to implement high-quality
offline renderers like those I mentioned above. These have nothing to do
with OpenGL.