JuliaRender

OpenCL-enabled Mandelbrot and Julia set renderer I wrote to learn multithreading in C/C++

Started in the Fall Break of my junior year of high school, a fresh, sweet pre-pandemic October 2019.

How to use

• Arrow keys move you around the place
• Using o and l will zoom you out/in respectively
• Pressing y changes the precision level from float to double and long double. Check terminal output to see which precision you're at, or just notice the lag as you switch to long double
• Press h to switch between rendering the Mandelbrot set and rendering a Julia set
• While in a Julia set, the keypad keys 8, 4, 2, and 6 will change a complex number juliaInit. This is some "seed" number for choosing which Julia set to view. Very nice results.
• Use i and k to increase/decrease the amount of iterations, respectively. When reaching the max number of iterations, the code draws a pixel as black to let you know that it's hit its max.
• If you have OpenCL (TODO: make OpenCL optional), switch between OpenCL and Native C++ with y

Have fun with this. This was just to teach myself how to multithread intense algorithms in C and how to use SDL2. This was originally written in C, until I discovered C++ templates and immediately jumped on the bandwagon. Now it's expanded to use OpenCL and maybe even CUDA in the future.

Demo images