Fractorium - A GPU accelerated fractal flame editor renderer [Voat OC]
38 06 Jul 2016 23:28 by u/fractorium
Hello Voat programmers,
I have spent the last four years making a rewrite of the original fractal flames algorithm with GPU support using OpenCL. The project name is Fractorium and includes processing libraries, three command line programs, and a graphical editor and renderer.
Installers are available for Windows and Ubuntu at fractorium.com. There is also documentation which includes a getting started guide, detailed reference info, tips and tricks, and developer information.
Like the original flam3 project, this is also FOSS and is hosted on bitbucket.
Other similar programs are Apophysis (the most popular), Chaotica and JWildfire.
Fractorium offers solid support for AMD (GCN and later) and Nvidia (Fermi and later) cards. Because rendering fractals is an iterative process which plots pseudo-random points, it's very computationally intensive and cache-unfriendly. It is for this reason that GPU support makes such a big difference.
In addition to making the editing process much smoother for an artist, it also serves as a great GPU benchmarking tool. It stresses the card in interesting ways that most test programs do not. When rendering in either Fractorium or on the command line, performance statistics are shown so you can see how your system measures up.
I have ceased work on it for the time being due to needing a long overdue rest, but I am always interested in feedback so let me know what you think.
PS: I am posting this on v/programming because I'm not sure where else such a post would go.
5 comments
1 u/captbrogers 07 Jul 2016 02:54
Very cool!
1 u/tame 07 Jul 2016 03:53
Ooh, pretty! Gonna have a play with this later. :)
0 u/fractorium [OP] 07 Jul 2016 21:34
If you like pretty, be sure to check out the dark theme that comes with it: http://fractorium.com/?page_id=436
0 u/magister94 07 Jul 2016 19:42
I used to use https://sourceforge.net/projects/flam4/ to allow people to render high res flam3/4 fractals from a web page. I had to forget about that when I moved my server to Linux. I might resurrect that project now. This is really cool. You are awesome.
0 u/fractorium [OP] 07 Jul 2016 21:33
Nice finding you here! I remember seeing your project around. Small world.
Flam4 had some flaws, the worst of which was it would regularly crash. It has long since been a dead project. However, it lives on in an improved form in the Fractal Architect program for mac. Give it a try if you're interested in revisiting it.*
Give my project a try, it has full GPU support from the command line as well as the UI for both still images and animations. It will even support multiple GPUs, so if you have more than one on your server, it can take advantage of them. Note that I've only gotten multi-GPU to work on Windows, I could never get Linux to see two cards. Regardless, myself and others have spent over 2 years testing this heavily, so there should be no problems with stability.
*I met up with the FA team a few months ago in person and we discussed our projects in depth for about 5 hours. It was a really great session, they are cool guys.