Matt Giwer wrote:
> 
>     It dawned on me last night something I have not
> been reading that I would expect to be very common.
> That is comments on the source code to the effect "this
> algorithm is faster than the one uses in POV." Are they
> in a newsgroup I don't read? Am I blinkd? Are the
> algorithms from some accepted standard package? Not
> that I want to get involved in that kind of thread.

Nobody bothers to boast that they have an algorithm faster than ray
tracing, since ray tracing optimizes for realism rather than speed and
ends up being the slowest 3-D rendering algorithm out there (except for
radiosity and hybrid radiosity/ray tracing, the latter of which is
supported after a fashion in POV-Ray).  If you want speed, pick a
different algorithm.

There are ways to provide speed improvement to ray tracing algorithms,
mostly involving exploiting some sort of coherence (bounding, light
buffer, vista buffer, etc.).  POV-Ray has implemented most of those over
the years.

-Mark Gordon

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