[vtkusers] [vtk-developers] GPU volume rendering on ATI Radeon in VTK 5.8

Mon Mar 26 05:16:58 EDT 2012

Hi all,

Our experience with GPU and mac graphic card is the following :

- Macbook pro 2011, with ATI HD6750M running OSX Lion -> working fine, with
the option ShadeOn on the volume property
- iMac with ATI HD5740, running OSX Snow Leopard -> not working at all,
experimenting the same crash as Karthik
- Macbook pro 2010, with an NVIDIA GT330M running OSX Lion -> working
strangely, sometimes half of the volume is rendered correctly, and the
other part is like a plain cube. But this might be related to the card
memory's capacities as it can hold only 256 Mo.

We had to build vtk 5.8 with a patch similar to the one that Julien
provided, and to backport the commit that fixed the shader in order to
test/use that.

So what we are doing internally is :
If the system is OSX Lion, and the card name is ATI, use the
vtkGPUVolumeRayCastMapper mapper, otherwise (on OSX only), fall back to the
vtkFixedPointVolumeRayCastMapper ... Not ideal, and not the same
interaction experience for all users, but at least some mac users can make
use of the power of their graphic card.

Hope this can help.
-Simon

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 16:54, Karthik Krishnan <
karthik.krishnan at kitware.com> wrote:

> Julien:
>
> Yes. We know that it after the fixes (
> http://vtk.org/gitweb?p=VTK.git;a=commit;h=ffe79ee12dcdc7b32defa9523567075a73dccbe7),
> it still does not work on certain mac/GPUs. We use the vtkSmartVolumeMapper
> that defaults to software rendering when the GPU renderer says that it
> cannot render. Its better for the GPU mapper to conservatively state that
> it cannot render rather than state that it can and fail on certain
> platforms/hardware combinations.
>
> Rather than enable it on all Macs, I would recommend that you do is to
> selectively enable it only on known combinations of Mac/ graphic cards.
>
> Here's what I know :
>
>
> 1. On my iMac
>
> - Snow Leopard 10.6, ATI Radeon HD 4670, OpenGL 2.1 ATI-1.6.18
> - Results in a crash (of the worst kind). It freezes the machine,
> necessitating a restart.
> - Attached is the iMac output log of the text.
> - Attached is the iMac glxinfo.
>
> The error is
>     Validation Failed: Sampler error:
>     Samplers of different types use the same texture image unit.
>          - or -
>    A sampler's texture unit is out of range (greater than max allowed or
> negative).
>
>
> 2. On my macbook
> - NVidia GeForce 9400M<http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_9400m_g_us.html> (integrated
> video card, that uses 256MB of the main system memory)
> - 10.5.8 (Leopard)
> - All tests pass except all tests that use shading. They are
>     TestGPURayCastCompositeBinaryMask
>     TestGPURayCastCompositeShadeMask
>     TestGPURayCastCropping
>
>
> 3. A user has reported that it works on Lion, Nvidia card (
> http://markmail.org/message/7mmcz5euptb56fw5). Not sure what card he is
> referring to.
>
> 4. Bob O'Bara (Kitware) had once sent me an email reporting that it works
> on his iMac and MacbookPro, both running ATI cards. (not sure if he tried
> it with shading ON, and not sure about the OS (version) they run).
>
> --
> karthik
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, Julien Finet <julien.finet at kitware.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Do we have any reason to keep disabling ATI cards from using the GPU
>> raycaster on Mac OS X?
>>
>> If not, I will backport this commit into VTK.
>>
>> https://github.com/Slicer/VTK/commit/3916fd9e3306ff0874379950764a7539a219f7f6
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Julien.
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Karthik Krishnan <
>> karthik.krishnan at kitware.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Yes. With the fix, GPU volume ray cast is supported on ATI now.
>>>
>>> Let's ask Dave Partyka if this fix can be moved to the last release of
>>> VTK ?
>>>
>>> thanks
>>> --
>>> karthik
>>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 10:00 PM, ianl <ilindsay at insigniamedical.co.uk>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Good news. Looks like this might be fixed now (I haven't checked for my
>>>> card
>>>> yet though):
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://vtk.org/gitweb?p=VTK.git;a=commit;h=ffe79ee12dcdc7b32defa9523567075a73dccbe7
>>>>
>>>> I think you will need to get the master version. Any chance of this
>>>> getting
>>>> this merged into the 5.8 branch? It might already be, my knowledge of
>>>> git is
>>>> limited at best!
>>>>
>>>> Ian Lindsay
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> View this message in context:
>>>> http://vtk.1045678.n5.nabble.com/GPU-volume-rendering-on-ATI-Radeon-in-VTK-5-8-tp4806774p4955675.html
>>>> Sent from the VTK - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> --
> karthik
>
>
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Simon Esneault - Therenva
Centre d'Innovation Technologique
Centre Cardio-Pneumologique
CHU Pontchaillou
Rennes, France
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Mail : simon.esneault at therenva.com
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