nvidia CUDA support for VisualMill CAM?

[Mark Angus]

Is the CUDA technology useful for toolpath calculation and /or toolpath simulation?

At the moment I am playing around with 3dcoat which uses the technology for 3d modeling.

http://www.3d-coat.com/

example : In the financial market, Numerix and CompatibL announced CUDA support for a new counterparty risk application and achieved an 18X speedup.

[gumbyrulesyou]

I don't know if CUDA would really help for VisualMill, as it involves breaking jobs up in to a zillion little individual threads that run in parallel. As it stands, VisualMill can't even use more than one regular CPU, which sucks when you have desktop computers with four or more these days.

[MecSoft Support]

To answer Mark's question, yes we have looked at it and there are elements we could use the GPU for. The main advantage in this is performance but some of our tests and also our 3rd party partner's tests have shown that the performance improvement is not worth the programming effort required at this point of the evolution of this technology. Once GPU programming standards are standardized among the different vendors this might become more feasible.

Regarding using multiple threads, this is already implemented in our upcoming release.