On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:03:28AM +0000, Claude Heiland-Allen wrote:
Wondering if there are any plans for dataflow on the GPU in Gem?
By this I mean that a patch cord would be a representation of pixel data transfer paths on the GPU, and objects would process pixel data on the GPU.
I also do not mean using depth first message passing as a mechanism to shoehorn OpenGL state machine into Pd without concern for dataflow semantics (sorry if that sounds harsh - but it's the most counterintuitive aspect of Gem imo).
Also cool would be to have streams of geometry data flowing down the wires. In other words, an OpenGL scenegrapher for Pd. At the top of your chain you'd have a 'cube' object which would output the geometry for a cube every frame. Further down you would have geometry and colour and texture modifiers, and these would terminate in a [draw] object, which would render the resulting geometry. This is basically GEM flipped upside down.
This has been discussed on the list before but never went anywhere. Maybe I should talk less and code more. :)
Best,
Chris.