Ben Paschke wrote:
> 
> Hiya folks,
> 
> Just for a laugh, has anyone thought of adding the option of which way
> to render the image?
> For example, bottom to top or right to left, instead of the regular top
> to bottom starting at the left.
> Once or twice i've thought it may be nice...
> 

Well, it's not for laugh, changing rendering order might speed up
rendering: if rendering is performed by buckets, lets say 32x32 pixels,
then renderer can take advantage of spatial coherence and use various
caching mechanisms more effectively. With current option (from left to
right) rays are hit all over the scene and almost all objects are being
hit during scanning one line, thus making cacheing less effective. 
Perhaps this is not the issue with current implementation, but if
someone wants to implement true displacement mapping and use selective
surface division (only this bucket, which is hit, is displaced) to avoid
problems with memory, then this could give considerable speedup. 
And with really large scenes, which require more memory, than available
(thus requiring use of swap space) it could be faster as well.

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