Raindrop Splash Raytraced In 8K With Custom CFD Software

As Dr. Moritz Lehmann, Intel's GPU Software Development Engineer, explained, using traditional commercial CFD software would have resulted in compute times that could stretch into decades during his PhD studies. To overcome this, he had to master GPU programming, develop his own CFD solver from scratch, and reduce runtime to just days. Today, FluidX3D, his breakthrough CFD software, makes lightning-fast simulations available to everyone, running on hardware from all vendors and solving a wide range of visualization challenges.

FluidX3D features state-of-the-art volume-of-fluid and surface tension models, enabling highly accurate free surface simulations. Paired with a custom OpenCL graphics engine, the results are raytraced in real-time at image resolutions as large as the available memory allows.

While GPUs today still have limited unified VRAM, CPUs don't face this issue. A dual-socket Intel Xeon 6 system can support up to 6TB of MRDIMMs with 1.7TB/s bandwidth, all within unified memory.

According to Dr. Lehmann, this is especially beneficial for algorithms that can't be divided into multiple memory domains, such as the fast ray-grid-traversal raytracing used in FluidX3D. In this demo, the developer simulated a raindrop splash on a system with 2x Intel Xeon 6979P processors, handling 4.3 billion cells in 380GB of memory (without FP16 memory compression). The server completed the simulation in around 8 hours, with the 8K raytracing process taking approximately 19 hours.

8K resolution means each frame is 33 megapixels. For every pixel, up to 10 rays are traced, including two reflections and refractions, with the entire simulation domain refracted through each droplet. The resulting PNG images alone occupy 48GB. Handling such large image and video resolutions is challenging, as only FFmpeg supports it for free.

Find FluidX3D on GitHub here and check out the developer's YouTube channel for more videos. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.