0002395: General calculation on GPUs (OpenCL, CUDA etc) to make FreeCAD work faster - FreeCAD Tracker

NOTICE: Migration to GitHub Issues

On Feb 7, 2022, the FreeCAD project migrated all issues from this site at tracker.freecad.org to our main GitHub repository. All new bugs must be submitted there.
This Mantis repository is in read-only mode and will be retained for reference as long as it is useful.

For details please see the announcement at the Forums: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?p=555883#p555883

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0002395	FreeCAD	Feature	public	2016-01-09 02:39	2016-02-23 14:21

Reporter	ChapaikinVA	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	feature	Reproducibility	have not tried
Status	closed	Resolution	no change required
Platform	all	OS	all	OS Version	all
Fixed in Version	0.16

Summary	0002395: General calculation on GPUs (OpenCL, CUDA etc) to make FreeCAD work faster
Description	Implement an optional support of general calculation on GPUs (like via OpenCL), please. Now FreeCAD often (when recalculates a lot of changes) works very slowly.
Tags	No tags attached.

FreeCAD Information

yorik 2016-01-09 18:01 administrator ~0006699	I'm afraid this is not possible for us to do. All these calculations are done by OpenCasCade, FreeCAD's geometry kernel. Such request should be made to them at http://dev.opencascade.org/

ChapaikinVA 2016-01-09 18:43 reporter ~0006702	I can submit them such feature request of course. But I am an end user, not a programmer. So now I do not understand even what exactly is OpenCASCADE at all and internally. So, it is possible that I'll not be understood properly. If somebody of FreeCAD team think that this feature request is desired, it migth be better, if he (instead of me) describe and post such report.

yorik 2016-01-09 18:59 administrator ~0006703	opencascade is a piece of software that does 99% of all the geometrical calculations inside freecad. It's the "engine" of freecad. I honestly doubt it would be of any use to request that to them, because GPUs are tailored for mesh and rendering calculations, I don't think it can be of any use (at least today, maybe in the future) for solid geometry and nurbs, which is what we use mostly in freecad (and what generates all the heavy calculation) They would probably listen only if the contrary could be proved to them, but that would mean do quite a lot of research... Not sure there will be many volunteers Someone asked already... not much answer :) http://www.opencascade.com/content/gpu-acceleration

ChapaikinVA 2016-01-09 19:45 reporter ~0006705 Last edited: 2016-01-09 19:45	Ok. __________ General calculation on GPUs is very powerful. I know it as I use BOINC projects on my PC. They use GPUs both integer and floating calculations. As I can see (there are two graphics cards on my PC) the performance of GPU applications is ~ 10 - 1000 (!!!) times higher than for CPU (4 cores, 1333 MHz) applications.

yorik 2016-02-23 14:21 administrator ~0006845	I will close this issue, because there is AFAIK nothing to do on our side, don't hesitate to reopen if needed or have more info.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2016-01-09 02:39	ChapaikinVA	New Issue
2016-01-09 18:01	yorik	Note Added: 0006699
2016-01-09 18:43	ChapaikinVA	Note Added: 0006702
2016-01-09 18:59	yorik	Note Added: 0006703
2016-01-09 19:45	ChapaikinVA	Note Added: 0006705
2016-01-09 19:45	ChapaikinVA	Note Edited: 0006705
2016-02-23 14:21	yorik	Note Added: 0006845
2016-02-23 14:21	yorik	Status	new => closed
2016-02-23 14:21	yorik	Resolution	open => no change required
2016-02-23 14:21	yorik	Fixed in Version	=> 0.16