NOTE: For now this task is only meant for Cycles developers and module members!
Hi,
Now that 2.76 is out (at least the RC), it's time to think about the Blender 2.8x project and Cycles.
I see the 2.8x project as an opportunity to rethink some things and to work on bigger projects. Here some ideas that came into my mind.
(Bigger) projects
- Continue work on the Kernel Split for both OpenCL and CUDA
- Runtime compilation for CUDA kernels (feature based compilation as a first step, can happen before the kernel split as well)
- OpenVDB integration
- Rethink our bundled set of procedural textures, especially if we want to extend them in a meaningful way. (see e.g. D1463)
Deprecations
- Remove Cache BVH feature (done)
- Drop support for CUDA on 32bit platforms: I highly doubt that people, using a 32 bit OS are serious about GPU compute. And honestly, inline checks for e.g triangle_intersect_precalc() are a joke atm, Even with the kernel split, runtime compile on a 32bit OS with just 2GB of memory is highly questionable too. So I think 2.8x is a good opportunity to drop support here.
Looking forward to feedback here from you guys (@Sergey Sharybin (sergey) @Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) and others)