What Ken states is true. However, there are accelerator boards for professional
graphics that will accelerate POV-Ray. Daystar sells them for the Mac.
Basically, they work by replacing your motherboard with a quad-CPU motherboard.
They are expensive and top out at 1,800 mhz.

If you really want speed, Silicon Graphics has a motherboard that can support
256 alpha RISC CPU's which are now running at 1,000 mhz for a total speed of
256,000 mhz. Better have some really deep pockets for this.

A low budget solution is to get a dual Pentium Dell server and run it as a
workstation.

steve

Ken wrote:

> Jim Kress wrote:
> >
> > Really?  Even with the onboard shading, lighting, and rendering functions?
> > Or would a card specific version of POV be required to take care of those
> > functions?
> >
> > --
> > Jim
>
>  With the current way that Pov works it calculates each pixel internal to the
> program before it outputs to the screen. There are no internal routines that
> take advantage of external hardware accelerations. If you read the literature
> carefully they make reference to direct x and openGL instruction sets which
> are specificaly written to take advantage of such abilities. Pov works in a
> completely different way. There's has been a lot of talk about writting an
> openGL preview mode for Pov but it is problematic and would still not help
> for final renders. Quality of the images produced but direct X and openGL
> are inferior to Pov's raytracing methods anyway and I personaly think it
> would be a step backward.
>
> --
> Ken Tyler
>
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net
> http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/links.htm

Post a reply to this message