[ActsJuvenile]

> That sounds like a poor approach to this problem. You could write a shader that renders thick lines for the dendrites, and the rest of the geometry can be conventional meshes. The same shader could have a pass specially designed for lines and depth of field rendering. That's the one unusual shader. It's hard, but not super hard to write. [0]

You will be surprised how bad medical research and visualization is compared to their gaming counterparts. Most medical researchers use 5-10 year old technological approaches they learned in their PhD program.

On a side note, I have yet to see a Phi-vs-CUDA comparison. Intel is comparing Phi to Pentiums, which is utterly ridiculous.

[milcron]

Here is a comparison of the previous generation: https://www.xcelerit.com/computing-benchmarks/libor/intel-xe...

They hold their own against GPGPU, but are probably the inferior choice if your code already runs on a GPU (OpenCL/CUDA).

The real advantage of the Phi is of course combining this nearly-as-good-as-GPGPU parallelism with the x86_64 toolchain and infrastructure. x86 supports more languages with more libraries, and is easier to develop for.

[berkut]

That's not quite fair - some of the research into volumetric medium interaction and scattering is way ahead of the VFX / Gaming fields...