Sweet!

You never did say if GPU crunchers can use this screensaver in the other thread..

awwww, i just got a new iMac with a ATI card.. and now i have to wait longer. :(
by the way, my vote is on colour! Is the yellow bit the part that we crunched?

Great work Shane:

I tend not to use screen savers myself, but I appreciate the effort you are putting into this project.

Question: I run up to four GPU's at a time, so how would this affect the screen saver, if at all?

Kind Regards
David
____________

Really looks nice! Great job!

Alexander

[quote]Color seems to be the popular choice so far, but additional votes are welcome.
quote]

No change, still voting for color!

Or would you like to eat a black and white steak, chicken or salad? And how do you think about a grey bear?
I spend some FLOPS for a nice background!

Alexander

Hi David, Hi everyone here! Despite a less amount of CPU job during screensaver mode, I think a nice and colorful one would be a good promo for the project: you know, many BOINC users choose projects depending on a brilliant graphic or not. I think you can try to develop a screensaver nice for the eyes and not so "vampiric" for the CPUs: the main result for the project as credits growth will tell if we're right!
In my humble idea, of course ;-)

Greetings!

The Dreamer

____________

Hi Dreamer

I agree with you, color is important.

Cheers
David
____________

Another vote for color!
____________
"There is no limit to the amount of good a
person can do if they do not care who gets credit for it."

The color looks much better the black and white. It helps to visualize the pictures better. I think the Milkyway could be toned down just a tad so it doesn't look as bright.
____________
Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

Wow, it's so pretty - I don't suppose you could also release a dedicated standalone version? XD
Edit: oh, or do you already intend to? I should have read your last post more carefully.

Colour.

That is amazing, and I agree, it will likely add interested users just because you have an interesting "eye-candy" screen saver which more or less shows what milkyway is doing (in a pictorial sense - pictures are worth 1000 words).

____________
http://www.joescat.com/boinc/

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I am so glad to be living in these days when I can be part of something like this. Even if what I am adding to the whole is not significant right now, just being part of it is wonderful. I really dig where your are going with the screensaver. I vote for color.

The coloured version looks very nice!

One idea to speed up the screensaver:
It seems you try to display a lot of points (stars). I guess many of them will be verry close (at lest on the screen). Would it be possible to reduce the data to display by some kind of "abstraction" ? Maybe you can select only some representatives of the whole star dataset, based on distances to each other. Another idea would be to "merge" several stars together, and replace them by one star with an "averaged" position and brightness. What do you think?

About the ATI GPU version: I have a relatively fast ATI Mobile HD 5850 in my new laptop,
but it does not support double precision. Will there be a GPU app for single precision GPUs some day ??

Best regards,
Frank

Another idea to optimize the sceensaver:

Which part will be changed more often, the Milky Way, or the wedge?
The wedge on the preview screenshot basicially looks like a slice moving in 3D. Maybe you could use a 2D surface to render the wedge into, and then let OpenGL project the data onto the "slice" in 3D?
If the Milky Way will not change, you might get some speed back by "preparing" the data once, instead of colouring and transforming it for every screen update.

best regards,
Frank.

I have a question that didn't hit me till now..

Most screensavers for BOINC projects only keep showing till the current WU is finished ..then the screensaver goes away when the new WU starts crunching..what will happen if a GPU user opens up the screensaver being that it only takes me about 1:14mins to complete 1 WU?

Maybe it would help to look at the "abstraction" problem from the astrophysics point of view? You could merge stars based on their distance and mass/brightness once, and then use this abstracted dataset for the screensaver. If you are already looking at N-Body simulations, you could possibly re-use a spatial tree representation (like a barnes-hutt octtree); the end nodes of such a tree could be candidates for merging. Would it be possible to allow the user to control the amount of abstraction?

best regards,
Frank

"It seems you try to display a lot of points (stars). I guess many of them will be very close (at lest on the screen). Would it be possible to reduce the data to display by some kind of "abstraction" ? Maybe you can select only some representatives of the whole star dataset, based on distances to each other. Another idea would be to "merge" several stars together, and replace them by one star with an "averaged" position and brightness. What do you think?"
- Frankm

Absolutely! I have been kicking this idea around since the start of the project, but there are a few issues. The stars could be cut up into sections and averaged by using an inverse tree. This is similar to what is done when rendering textures at further distances. This tends to create a flickering effect during the transition that I considered undesirable for the screensaver. It could be overcome completely by waiting until stars were less than an 8th of a pixel apart to use their average. This did not seem necessary for the screensaver as it is now, but this mehthod would be critical for a larger-scale application using millions of stars and a larger range of distances.
- Shane Reilly

An other vote for color.
____________

I think that card [ATI 5850] should support doubles. Nearly all of the 5xxx series do, except randomly a couple don't.
-- Matt

...they state that only the Mobility Radeon HD 4800 Series supports doubles.

First on topic another vote for color

now offtopic: ofcourse not many mobility videocards support double precision..
the whole purpose of these cards is trying to give a good output with minimal heat and power draw ...
lol what you think double precision do ;), mw is a super way to heat up your videocard and if its a laptop get it to shutdown because gets overheated xD
All normal HD 5850 support double precision only the lower models seem to lack this but its sometimes hard to find if they support it or not
I think the rule in this case is when they not mention it on the specs it probably is not implemented
____________
Its new, its relative fast... my new bicycle

I see its been 32 days since last reply..any updates on the screensaver release?

I see multiple blue dots in almost all views but none look like a cube.


Intel q6600 quad, Asus p5k deluxe, 3 gig ddr ram, 4850 ATI video.
____________
"There is no limit to the amount of good a
person can do if they do not care who gets credit for it."

Indeed, lots of pretty blue bubbly things fading in and out. They sort of form a cube together, but not really. I also managed to break it at some point - pressed > and everything went black aside from the axes at the top.

Wow, it's so psychedelic. Took me a while to figure out how to get it to work. The F keys only take effect once you actually press > or <, and once they do you can't stop it, only go faster or slower and switch between zooming in and out. F5 is a bit too fast for me, I'd recommend F4 (is this dependent on the speed of your PC?). It sort of ends up like an angry white blob - is that intended? The blue edges seem to be divided into two bands instead of a smooth transition, but maybe that's just how it works.

Ok got to the cube but my in out controls are < (out) > (in)

Out meaning the cube gets smaller or further away and in means the cube goes to individual dots.

Also the arrows move the cube opposite the arrow,,,,,,






____________
"There is no limit to the amount of good a
person can do if they do not care who gets credit for it."

Sorry, my in/out controls </> do not work. Maybe because of german keyboard layout?