Document which nodes run on CPU or GPU

Feature Requests
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1

I find performance to sometimes be unpredictable. I assume that some nodes are not processed on the GPU?
It would be great if the Vuo node documentation could include whether a node is rendered on the GPU or CPU.

2

I can give you an overview right now of the nodes that benefit from GPU acceleration. To be clear, these nodes do the bulk of their work on the GPU, but still use the CPU some to manage the GPU. Going by node set:

  • vuo.image — the nodes that render or filter images (but not nodes like Fetch, Find Barcode, or Sample Color)
  • vuo.layer — the nodes that do the final rendering to a window or image
  • vuo.scene — the 3D object filters and the nodes that do the final rendering to a window or image
  • vuo.screen — Capture Image of Screen
  • vuo.shader — all nodes, though all the processing happens in the final render-to-window-or-image node
  • vuo.video — for certain codecs such as H.264

@manuelmitasch, does that cover the information you’d like to have added to the documentation? Or do you have further questions about performance? If further questions, it might help if you could give some examples where you have found performance unpredictable.

3

Thank you for the overview.

It seems like basically all image processing is done on the GPU. Good to know.
I believe my performance problems came from this bug (https://community.vuo.org/t/-/5712/2) and using high quality blur on a Mac mini with no dedicated GPU.

I just tested a couple of examples with all kinds of nodes and it seems my performance issues are gone in the new 1.2.4 version.

4

@manuelmitasch, good to know. We’ll add some basic documentation.

5

We’ve added some information about GPU acceleration to the Image and Scene node set documentation in release 1.2.6.