Crom: A GPU/CPU Hybrid Platform for Visual Effects

By Jon K. Carroll
published

A technical look at how GPUs can aid visual effects.

Academy-Award Winning Rhythm and Hues looks at their hybrid CPU and GPU-based image processing workflow for visual effects. They go over the problems with a modern VFX workflow, and how they approached rewriting their content development and image management systems to increase productivity and make better use of their available processing power. This discussion is a bit more technical than some of the other sessions and spends a bit of time delving into how their data structures and workflow are organized.

Most of the time is spent in their compositing software, which uses both CPU and GPU processing, in order to make best use of available processing power.

Jon K. Carroll
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • warbler boy
    Adio is barely audible and this really looks like a lazy piece.
    Reply
  • atminside
    Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important! Valor pleases you, Crom... so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!
    --Conan
    Reply
  • Draven35
    More like R&H was trying to talk about it without disclosing proprietary information. I was hoping there would be a bit more to this when I attended, but it is what it is...
    (and better to have audio you need to turn up, than noisy distorted audio...)
    Reply
  • albert 89
    Sounds interesting, I think AMD's APU's should benefit the most . I guess in a way its like hardware acceleration in the browser using the video card more rather than relying only on the CPU most of the time. We've seen the growth of software written to take advantage of multithreading as a way to share the work load across the cores. This is just another way to make use of hardware that otherwise would be sitting idle. Its advantage would mean less powerful hardware capable of doing triple the work load increasing battery life benefiting laptops & mobile phones. I'd love it to be retro compatible with systems older than 6yrs, why not !
    Reply