I happened upon this piece from the Blender Conference (2006) when looking for ways to speed up the Blender render engine. It blew my mind. “By porting some of the OpenGL calls in the code to more modern standards, we could easily increase rendering speed 10 times”. Just one quote. The demo of his custom renderer (don’t know if it uses Blender, though) is jaw-dropping. If I understood it correctly, this guy is on the board developing OpenGL, so that makes sense…
Is this being followed up? It seems that all that is needed (well, ‘all’ does not mean it will be quick, but…) is an update of OpenGL command calls, and the guy provides a bunch of straight solutions. I do not have the experience for diving into the Blender code (or I definitely would, after seeing this!), but it’s my hope that someone has taken this up, so we can cut rendering time by 10 or more in the near future. Does anyone know if someone has followed up??
To be honest, I was (am?) under the assumption that the Blender Internal renderer uses OpenGL for its rendering. Am I mistaking? If so, then I guess doing the OpenGL overhaul means only minor improvements, seeing as large scenes (at least mine) are handled as seperate components with minimal viewport lag.
But he does use refracting demo balls, so it would seem that it is related to the internal renderer… or?
What he was talking about was the OpenGL drawing commands for rendering the interface could be improved (drastically). It won’t affect render times, but could definitely affect responsiveness, vert counts in your scene and sculpt mode.
