Hello Voat programmers,

I have spent the last four years making a rewrite of the original fractal flames algorithm with GPU support using OpenCL. The project name is Fractorium and includes processing libraries, three command line programs, and a graphical editor and renderer.

Installers are available for Windows and Ubuntu at fractorium.com. There is also documentation which includes a getting started guide, detailed reference info, tips and tricks, and developer information.

Like the original flam3 project, this is also FOSS and is hosted on bitbucket.

Other similar programs are Apophysis (the most popular), Chaotica and JWildfire.

Fractorium offers solid support for AMD (GCN and later) and Nvidia (Fermi and later) cards. Because rendering fractals is an iterative process which plots pseudo-random points, it's very computationally intensive and cache-unfriendly. It is for this reason that GPU support makes such a big difference.

In addition to making the editing process much smoother for an artist, it also serves as a great GPU benchmarking tool. It stresses the card in interesting ways that most test programs do not. When rendering in either Fractorium or on the command line, performance statistics are shown so you can see how your system measures up.

I have ceased work on it for the time being due to needing a long overdue rest, but I am always interested in feedback so let me know what you think.

PS: I am posting this on v/programming because I'm not sure where else such a post would go.