Please, Could FF Inc confirm if there is any plan for CUDA/OpenGL/GPU?

CUDA Accelerated Photoshop Plug in great speed comparison

To be sure what road is going to really take Filter Forege Inc. and what can be their future plans, AT LEAST about the topic of GPU optimization.

Please, could be so kind Vladimir or someone from FF Inc. to answer to this thread?

Vladimir Golovin said in 2006 that it would not have GPU acceleration anytime soon, so was possible that in the future COULD BE POSSIBLE.

Then 5 years after in 2011 before the release of FF 3.0 Vladimir Golovin said that "FF won't have any CUDA/GPU based acceleration"

Now reading again all the posts I have found related to this topic and what he said, I have not seen that he has said "NEVER will have GPU acceleration", perhaps what he said on 2011 is that FF 3.0 was NOT going to have it, as it is not clear enough.

So the main point of this thread is to confirm and really know if:

WILL FILTER FORGE HAVE IN FF 4.0 SOME KIND OF GPU / CUDA / OPENGL / OPENCL OR WHATEVER ACCELERATION TO MAKE IT FASTER?

Please, if the answer is no:

Would be interesting if possible to know why 6 years after is still not possible?

And the most important:

IF NOT, WILL IT NEVER HAVE GPU ACCELERATION IN ANY FUTURE VERSION ???

Adobe photoshop CS5 has improved really much and is MUCH faster than before and it is reallyy a pleasure to use it now, would it be possible that this could happen the same with FILTER FORGE ?

Thanks very much for your help

I asked about this in April 2011 after the release of the FF 3.0 beta

Quote

Vladimir Golovin wrote IN April 2011 in this thread here Quote SpaceRay wrote: Will it be able to use graphic card accelleration by using Open Gl, Open CL, or Nvidia Cuda ? Unfortunately, no. We spent at least a year trying to port FF to graphic hardware, but no luck so far -- the current FF rendering architecture and multithreading werebuilt for X86, so it doesn't lend itself well to GPU porting.

Quote

Vladimir Golovin wrote IN 2006 in this thread here Quote richarre wrote in 2006: I would like to know if a Filter Forge GPU based render engine is in the pipeline Currently no, and I can't say anything about future releases. Look at Aperture's problems with their GPU-based photo editing (or was that Lightroom?) -- simply put, you have different results on different cards and different video drivers. Would be nice for preview purposes though. I agree, a GPU-based rendering would be really sexy, but it requires *huge* architechtural changes and leads to a lot more complicated development (tons of different hardware/driver combos to test on). Anyway, I would not expect that anytime soon. Quote Totte wrote in 2006: I think the other obvious route is to use OpenCL (not OpenGL), to use the GPUs cores to run pure logic in. That would speed up the rendering a lot, up to 30 times if you have a fast GPU, only using it for pure computation, which does not change between hardware.

I remember that was in 2006 EVEN BEFORE Filter Forge 1.0 was released

Quote
Vladimir Golovin wrote on 3 July 2011 in this thread here Quote SpaceRay wrote: Filter Forge WILL NOT HAVE ANY HARDWARE ACCELERATION True, FF won't have any CUDA/GPU based acceleration, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of x86-based acceleration. Intel's "Knight's Ferry" architecture definitely looks promising

Quote

Dmitry Sapelnikov (Filter Forge, Inc. AKA Egret) wrote on September 2, 2010 on this thread Quote cfree68 wrote: yeah it's too bad (FF) it's not GPU accelerated. I wonder if GPU acceleration is in the works for FF? On top of that. Photoshop itself uses GPU acceleration and most adobe apps have plugin technology called pixelbender which does similar things to some of the FF plugins Now I'm not saying its a small job to pull this off. I'm just saying FilterForge would be ideal for it. Especially with the newer more intensive effects like bomber. Just my 2 cents of course. There are some common problems connected with it. First of all, moving to GPU-based architecture needs time... a lot of time =) Many algorithms of FF components aren't suitable for GPU calculations due to their design (conditional operators, breaks in cycles). And FF uses double-precision calculations. AFAIR only nVidia Fermi architecture has low penalties for double-precision.

I can confirm there are no plans for GPU acceleration for Filter Forge 4.0. I don't know the details why this is infeasible; let's wait for Vladimir's response.

Spaceray... man that was an awfully long post.

I donno, I honestly kinda felt upset when you said,

Quote
Thanks for your answer GMM and the bad news

I previously worked at a studio (now gone unfortunately,) and we worked with various clients, individuals, and other artists who have made various requests and discussed all sorts of unique ideas. We worked on tight deadlines but we still managed high quality results. Once in a while we had clients who'd come into a studio expecting Hollywood quality work in 2 weeks. They'd say, "Well, isn't this stuff easy? I mean, isn't this a click of a button away? Why can't you do that faster? Do you need faster computers?" And my boss had a great response to that, "Why did you hire us to begin with if all of this is a click of a button away?"

See, that's exactly what that post sounded like. Sounds like things are being expected too early. As far as I understand (in my limited knowledge of software engineering and development) transitioning from what was originally written for CPU to GPU is a major challenge. So if anything, it sounds like a good chunk of code would have to be rewritten just so it can be run on GPU or maybe even the whole program. It's not a simple, "oh just copy-pasta here to make it work for GPU." I figure, it takes years and years to write software this complicated. Not to mention the amount of research that must have gone into figuring what's efficient, what's patented... what's what.

There's no "magic" in making things. It takes time, energy, skill, and deep understanding of stuff.

I do agree to a point that somethings are slow, but GPU would be a major leap that'd take a while before it happens. You can't expect it anytime soon.

And while I don't speak on the behalf of anybody here excepting myself, I felt the urge to type something out before I remember my clients.

oh right. No I reread it last night again and I just went "Oh the hell did I write there?" but oh well. Whatever I wrote there. Heh.

-- Off topic and totally unnecessary --

You know... the one thing I wish SpaceRay would do is to just cut the post lengths down so its not like I'm reading a novel each time I open a post. I mean, it's ok to write huge topics if it needs to be explained, but man... some of those posts get repetitive.

Ok I said enough. Get back on topic.

-- End off topic --

<Rant>
Everybody is switching to GPU based
Get on the boat..
Or sink like the rest..
It Is So Easy To Do..

Hello world..

My 2 Cents...
</Rant Off>

Awesome SoftWare.. Would kick butt better in the Industry if it was optomized for GPU rendering..

Modo 601..
3DMAX...render engines
Games..
3rd Party Programs like TFD for Lightwave 11
etc etc etc

And Maybe throw in a render Buffer Support..

I have decided to not continue requesting for faster FF because FF Inc. will not be able to do it and I have not any hope that this will happen so I have taken a decision that you can read in this thread here