Flam4 - GPU Flame Fractal Renderer
26th October 2008
GPU Flame Fractal Renderer - new version available
Developed using CUDA; it needs “GeForce 8″ or newer nVidia cards, it also supports Quadro and Tesla cards.
Take a look here about CUDA supported cards: nVidia CUDA-Enabled GPU Products
Changelog
Flam4 0.08 - 2008-10-24 15:31
Now with density estimation!
Flam4CUDA v0.06 - 2008-10-12 08:23
The first release of Flam4 running with CUDA has been released!
6 December 2008 at 4:11 pm
Very nice application in the first place !
So I am using Vista64 and intalled CUDA driver ver. 180.60_CUDA_Vista64_beta with CudaSetup-win64-rel-nightly-2.1.1635-3046817 and NVIDIA_SDK10_CUDA_x64_2.10.1126.1520
and your application did not work. The SDK example programms did work properly ! I have two geforce 280 installed and disabeled SLI correctly…
Then I tried CUDA version 2.0 intead of 2.1 (fallback) of everything (DRIVER TOOLKIT SDK) and the examples worked well also, your flam4 did not !
After that I tried to use the 178.08_CUDA_Vista64 driver with the NVIDIA_CUDA_toolkit_2.0_win32 but this combination also not worked for me.
In Vista64 one can not install a 32 bit driver … Installing 32 bit software is actually no option for me.
So any help is greatly appreciated !
7 December 2008 at 11:42 am
I’m not the Flam4 author and I’ve never used it on Vista64.
I know that there are some installation problem about it and the author has found the solution; I’ll browse the msgs and I’ll send you the tips as soon as I’ll be able to access to the complete mail-archive (I’m traveling around the country using a secondary notebook now).
Please wait a couple of days!
13 December 2008 at 6:22 pm
Hi. Ive been looking for a while and is there anyway just render an image instead of a video?
Thanks in advance
17 December 2008 at 8:13 pm
@thedragon: As he said in an email “Here’s the solution. Install the CUDA Toolkit for Vista 32-bit. That’s right, to get Flam4 to work on 64-bit Vista, you have to install the CUDA toolkit for Vista 32-bit. Strange, but it actually works.”
@Peter: Take a look at Sourceforge cos … (the author) updates it quite often.
He said recently in an email “Right now, it’s limited by how large you can resize the window, and you can only save a single image through the old fashioned printscrn method. If you go to the options menu, you can uncheck the animate checkbox, and it will then only render the first frame of the flame loop, which is probably what you’re looking for. Also, the iterations bar controls the quality, up to approx. quality 5000 @1280×960.“
24 December 2008 at 6:31 pm
@theDragon: Try the 180.84 BETA vista64 driver with the 2.1 BETA vista32 toolkit.
Yes, the way NVIDIA packages the 32 vs 64 bit versions of CUDA is rather awful. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t help the matter by beating the dead 32-bit horse by releasing Vista with both 32 and 64 bit versions.
@Peter: I’m hoping to get .png support added in the next month or two. It would be nice if someone wrote a simple writePNG() function, rather than me having to learn every detail of the specification in order to make sense of the PNG library, but such is the life of a developer.
27 December 2008 at 7:02 pm
Thank you Keldor and Exper,
I tryd all possible combinations of Drivers and Toolkits systematically without sucess.
Nvidia 180.84 BETA vista64 Driver (grafics) and 2.1 BETA vista32 CUDA toolkit are not working with FLAM4 version 21 up to 36.
In most cases the screen stays black, in some the display driver crashes nicely.
Is there an option in flam4 to render large stillframes as png files (more than 9000px in with)?
Is there an option to export 30 or 60 fps with x264 video compressor in 720p or 1080p format?
Why is the 180.84 BETA not located at the NV CUDA driver download page ? Why is it named a “normal gaming” driver as it supports CUDA ? Is There any more version chaos possible than having different drivers and toolkits and “everything BETA” for every version of the genuine Windows ?
My system is a dual socket Core 2 Extreme QX9775 with Sli 280 running Vista64.
Thanks in advance for any adittional help with this issue…
28 December 2008 at 8:00 pm
I not success to run flam4 too
(vista 64x)
Author need add commandline version, and example ‘flame’ file tested and working.
And good option (and think easy realisable) may be - save animation to file sequence (in any format)
1 January 2009 at 4:38 pm
@TheDragon:
When you say that version 21 through 36 aren’t working, does this mean that the older versions *are* in fact working? If that’s the case, then it’s probably a 2.1 beta issue, otherwise it’s probably a win64 issue.
There’s no way to render images directly yet - if you can provide a link or two to some good tutorials on using libpng or whatever to export an image, it would probably help me get it implemented sooner
Currently, the only option for video export is using the XVID codec, which I believe is supposed to be MPEG-4 h263 compliant. The format of the video itself will match whatever size your flam4 window happens to be when you run the render. I’m not likely to be doing too much with the video export end since as a rule of thumb, video codecs are highly complex, arcane, and most importantly, poorly documented. A hint to all open source library developers: releasing source code != documentation, particularly when the code in question is 10s or 100s of thousands of lines spanning many files in half a dozen directories :-P.
Anyway, I’m going to do some poking around on my sister’s x64 box and see if I can figure out what’s up with it in the time since I had it working a while ago. I’ll let you guys know if I get anywhere.