OpenCL 1.1 support

[raistlin969]

I was wondering if there will be support for things from the OpenCL 1.1 spec.  One example I was thinking of was the ability to use 3 component vectors.  Is this possible in OpenCL Studio.  I tried to declare a float3, but I get a compiler error.  If it is supported is there something special I have to do.  Also is it possible to create a geometry shader.

[opencldev]

As far as I know you have to use a special OPENCL EXTENSION directive, but I am not sure which one. I am sure that you can use float3 once you put that directive into the kernel code. The editor, however, does not support it yet natively, i.e. you cannot select float3 as a buffer format. I would stay away from this data type for now unless you really need to save the memory. I don't think that all of the OpenCL operations support float3 yet, and if then they most likely just call the analogous float4 operation under the hood.

As far as the shaders goes, the geometry shaders are in the pipeline, but you will probably see tessellators first. The development effort to support the additional shaders is minimal, so they should be there soon. Are you in need for this feature right now?

Also have a look at the tutorial section on the website. The latest set of video tutorials is starting to appear there.

[raistlin969]

Ok thanks for the info about the component vectors.  The main reason I was asking about that was I have a ray tracing book that I am going through and I wanted to implement that through OpenCL, but I was not sure of the value to assign to the 4th vector component to make sure it does not mess up the calculations when using the built in functions like dot.  I will just set the 4th value to either 0 or 1.  As for the shaders, I am not in need right now.  It is actually the tessellation that I was looking for, as I was interested in learning about water simulation and wanted to tessellate a plane.  Again, just another thing I was interested in learning to do with OpenCL.  Pretty much everything I have been doing so far has just been at the early part of the learning curve.  I will check out the new tutorials.  As always, thanks for the quick reply.